Difference between archive and retention policies

Email Archive and Retention policies are applied in similar ways, but they do very different things:

• Retention policy is the length of time an item or folder is kept, from its arrival time till it is moved to the Deleted Items folder.

  There is currently no default retention policy for mail folders -- items are only deleted when you specifically delete them. Students, alumni, faculty and staff all have the ability to add/change the retention policy for any mail message or folder.

  

  NOTE:

  Items in your Deleted Items folder take up space and count toward your overall mailbox quota (50 GB for students and 100 GB for faculty and staff), so you should delete them permanently when they are no longer needed.

• Archive policy is the length of time an item or folder is kept before it is moved to the Online Archive folder.
   
  Note that archiving only applies to faculty and staff members who were using EVault archiving before their mailboxes were migrated to Office 365. If you have email archiving enabled, you will see a mailbox folder named "Online Archive - yourname".

  Mail items stored in the Online Archive do not count toward your overall mailbox quota. Therefore, you can increase your available mailbox space by archiving older items that don't need to be accessed often.

   

Retention Policies

Faculty, staff and students can change the default retention policy on any mail item or folder by choosing a different policy (e.g. 1 week, 1 month, 6 month, etc.). The available retention policies are set up by IT Services. 

Outlook Web Application

1. Right-click on any folder and select Assign policy
   (for individual messages right-click and choose Advanced actions > Assign policy)
   
   
2. Choose the Retention policy you want to apply.

   

Outlook Microsoft 365 desktop app

Apply a Retention policy to a folder:

1. Right-click on the folder and select Properties.
2. Go to the Policy tab.
3. Select the type of Retention policy you want to apply.
   
    

Apply a Retention policy to an Individual mail message:

1. Right-click on the message, select Assign Policy.
2. Choose the Retention policy you want to apply to that message.

   

NOTE:

If the policy you select will cause an item to be expired immediately, you will see a warning:

Changing your Archive policies

Faculty and Staff with an in-place email archive folder named "Online Archive" may change the archive policy on individual mail items or entire folders to one of the available archive policies (e.g. 1 year, 4 month, 5 years, etc.) The archive policies available are set up by IT Services.

Immediate archiving: If you want to archive a message or folder immediately you can simply drag and drop it to one of the folders within the Online Archives folder in your Outlook  application or Outlook on the web.

Outlook on the Web

1. Right-click on any folder and select Assign Policy.
   (for individual messages right-click and choose Advanced actions > Assign policy)
   
   
2. Choose the Archive policy you want to apply.

   

Outlook Microsoft 365 desktop app

To apply an Archive policy to a folder:

1. Right-click on the folder and select Properties.
2. Go to the Policy tab.
3. At the bottom of the window, select the type of Archive policy you want to apply from the drop-down menu labeled Move items to the Archive when older than:
   
   
   

To apply an Archive policy to an individual mail message:

1. Right-click on the message, select Assign Policy.
2. Choose the Archive policy you want to apply to that message.
   
   

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:

• Index of setup instructions for McGill email
• FAQs for email on Office 365