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Email Retention Management Is In Your Control

MailMeter’s Email Retention Management solution is a powerful tool for granular destruction of messages from the MailMeter Archive.  The user interface allows a designated

MailMeter’s Email Retention Management solution is a powerful tool for granular destruction of messages from the MailMeter Archive.  The user interface allows a designated administrator to set destruction time periods, organize users into groups, assign the groups to destruction categories, and set the frequency of destruction – message purge.

This can not only help to ensure that your business’s email deletion policy is implemented while meeting email retention requirements – it also offers a level of protection against accidental or willful deletion and helps your business meet regulatory requirements more effectively.

1. Destruction Process

The Retention Manager Destruction process purges messages from the archive that have exceeded their retention criteria (all recipients have aged past their retention period). In addition, other messages in the archive will be purged:

  • Orphan messages: Any message where all recipients are not in your internal address book will be purged. For example: a message captured in a PST import or History Capture that was not from your organization and had no recipients on it from your organization.
  • Messages tagged as (Delete): Any message that has been tagged in MailMeter Investigate with a tag that has (Delete) in its description will be purged during any Destruction Process. This allows you to identify emails for immediate deletion and ensure that they are purged.
  • Messages with corrupted or missing dates: Any message captured by MailMeter with its Sent and Received date as 0 is considered as January 1, 1900 ensuring that corrupted mails are purged automatically.

Messages which match these criteria can be searched for and identified in MailMeter’s Investigate tool. These can then be either exported or the user can mark them as (Hold) to protect them from purging and prevent a potential loss of data.

2. User vs. System Delete

With MailMeter’s Retention Manager tool you can delete email records at either the individual user level or the system level – making the email unavailable to all users of the email system.

  • User: MailMeter Retention Manager has the capability of removing messages from a user’s search while still retaining them in the archive. For example, if you want messages from Sales removed after 3 years, but messages to Executives saved for 5 years, you can block the Sales team from seeing messages they sent to any Executive but the Executive can still see the message. When all User retention periods have expired, the message is purged.
  • System: MailMeter Retention Manager has the capability of purging messages from all users. This allow the System Administrator to override individual user retention policies and completely remove emails identified for deletion at the system level.

3. Categories, Periods, Groups

MailMeter Retention Manager allows you to easily manage your destruction policies.

  • Categories – retention periods: A Category is a retention period which can be set to a number of days, weeks, months, quarters or years. MailMeter allows you to add an unlimited number of Categories to set different deletion periods for different types of mail.
  • Best Practices: The software allows you to add a Default Category of 10+ years to emails to protect against the deletion of email messages which have not yet been assigned a Group by their user. While the software allows an unlimited number of Categories – a smaller number is more manageable.
  • Groups – collection of users: A Group is a collection of users that you identify through a selection from the address book. You can do this by department, business unit, or any other criteria by which your email policies are managed. You can have an unlimited number of Groups.
  • Best Practices: Groups are a very powerful way of managing retention periods or selecting specific mailboxes for legal holds.

4. Legal Hold

MailMeter Retention Manager allows you to easily manage your litigation holds to prevent the loss of potentially relevant documents or evidence.

  • Message level hold: You can use MailMeter Investigate to tag messages as Litigation Hold – any tag that has (Hold) in the description. MailMeter Retention Manager will not purge the messages from the archive until the Hold tag is cleared preventing loss of data. If a message passes its User retention period, it will still be kept in the archive searchable by MailMeter Investigate, but not visible to the end user.
  • Mailbox level hold: You can create a Group for a Legal Hold Category Retention period of 99 years. You can assign users to this group to protect any messages in their mailbox from being purged until their legal hold is released. You can put a mailbox in multiple groups. When a user is moved back to their specific Group, the next Destruction process will purge their messages that have passed retention period protection.

Take Control of Your Email Retention

Click here to see the full list of features offered by MailMeter and learn how it can help you to take control of your email archive. Or, for a personalized demonstration of any of our products or to see how we can help your business, get in touch with the team at Waterford Technologies by clicking here.