Outlook Mailbox Archiving - What should I know?

To keep everyone's Outlook mailbox tidy,  an email archiving system has been put in place.  The thresholds or email retention periods are as follows:

  • Email older than 3.5 years (1277.5 days, to be exact) will be expunged from your Outlook mailbox.
  • Deleted email older than 30 days will be expunged from your Deleted Items folder.

  • Junk email (found in “Junk Email” folder) older than 30 days, will be expunged from your Outlook mailbox.


Why is this helpful?

Less stuff in your Outlook mailbox makes Outlook run smoother.  Less to sort, less to search through, less to download, etc.


But what if there is something I need after 3.5 years have gone by?

Well, when I say “deleted”, I don’t really mean “deleted”, “deleted”. Our company compliance policy requires us to keep every email, ever sent or received for 5 years. Yes, EVERY email. Millions of emails! And we keep a couple years more than that for good measure. I have two different methods for you to recover email that you can’t find in your mailbox.


1. Mimecast– a cloud storage for all of our email, past and present. Officially since March 2018.

It also makes for a handy search tool if you’ve misplaced something in your mailbox or somehow deleted something you shouldn’t have.


How do I see/use this? 

Browse to:  https://hoffmanyork.login-us.mimecast.com/u/login/?gta=portal#/login

Login with your email address and computer password.


Your email will be stored in the same folder that it last existed. You will need to select a folder to search within it and can only search one folder at a time. You can modify the search criteria with the control panel to the right.

This can be a little tedious if you don't remember what folder the email/s may reside in. If you need help, please send your IT administrator your request - include keywords, email recipients, an approximate window of time, and some subject notes.


2. An old-school server - Email going back to the fall of 2011 through December 2015. 

To find something in this system, you will need my help.  But just let me know what you need, no problem.


3. Surprise! - For those of you who were with the company before 2011, and your email isn’t in option #2, your pre-2011 email is most likely located in archive files somewhere in the caverns of a server somewhere.  If you really need something that far back, we can take that journey together and see what we find.