Deleting All Messages Over One Year Old

[Scott]

My organization is required by legal counsel to implement a policy of
deleting (not archiving) all email messages over one year old in Inbox,
Outbox and all personal folders and older than 90 days in ‘Deleted items.’
Over the weekend I implemented the necessary recipient policy and mailbox
management settings, ran the mailbox management process, scheduled it to run
daily after hours and, at least on the server side, this resulted in messages
being deleted consistent with the policy. Additionally, through Group Policy
using Office Resource Kit templates, I disabled the ability of users to
auto-archive and I also created and impleneted an .adm file which prevents
users from creating .PST files.
The problem is, these actions had no impact on messages older than one
year/90 days which already exist within all the Outlook client Inboxes,
Outboxes, Deleted Items and Personal Folders. I need a solution which will
continuously clean out all messages in those folders on each Outlook client
consistent with the policy requirements. I am seeking the lowest cost and
easiest to manage solution because we are very lean-staffed. The best
solution would be one which is free, required very little of my time on an
ongoing basis and does not require installation of a software component on
every client because we have approximately 1300 Outlook clients.
What are my options to comply with this requirement?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You're halfway there already if not even more. The one thing you should do
as well is to disconnect all current pst-files in use as well since these
cannot be controlled by the Exchange retention policies. If you are in such
a controlled environment you really shouldn't allow the use of pst-files at
all (which you've indeed configured already).

From the information provided I cannot determine why messages that met your
retention settings weren't correctly dropped in the Exchange mailboxes. It
should also work on items already present within the mailbox before you
changed the policy. Exchange is designed to do what you need without the use
of any additional tools. You might want to ask this in an Exchange admin
group instead since it involves configuration at Exchange level and not at
Outlook level.