ISU's Email Retention Policy

In response to changing legal requirements, ISU Legal Counsel and the ISU ITAC committee have recommended the establishment of a 180-day Email Retention Policy. Based on those recommendations, and at the direction of the administration, email retention on the ISU Exchange email system will be set to 180 days effective June 30, 2011. At that time, all email and related attachments that are older than 180 days residing in Exchange (including any centrally stored copies of email on tape or backup disk) will be permanently deleted.

The Office of Information Technology understands that the conversations and data contained in your mail account and archives represent a considerable amount of time and effort and are likely vital to your day to day operations. We will assist in whatever way we can to preserve your data and help modify your workflow to accommodate this new policy.

What does that mean for me?
If you intend to retain any e-mail older than 180 days after the retention policy is enacted your current mail client will have to be configured for local archiving. The information below will assist you in addressing this before the June 30th deadline.

What about Archive Manager?
Archive Manager has been collecting every piece of mail you’ve received since the ISU email system was migrated to Outlook and may contain data from your former Groupwise archives. OIT will export email from Archive Manager and provide it in an electronic format for each user. After all accounts are exported Archive Manager will be turned off permanently.

Mac Users
Apple’s Mail.app and Microsoft’s Outlook 2011 e-mail client software lack a live archiving feature, which is the ability to automatically archive your e-mail messages. Outlook 2011 does not currently support an archiving feature while Mail.app does support archiving but the feature is not directly schedulable and would result in a large number of very small archives for each individual. The best solution identified for Apple users is to maintain the cabinet as a local resource and to regularly clean out the Inbox. Only messages left in the inbox older than 180 days would be subject to the retention policy. Using this solution will allow you to only access Inbox email when using the web client (OWA) or a second computer. OIT will continue to investigate auto-archiving solutions for Apple users, but we strongly recommend that you contact the OIT Help Desk at x2910 to set up an appointment with your OIT Consultant. This will allow us to assist you in setting up the local folders and give you sufficient time to become acclimated to the process before the June 30th deadline.

PC Users
By following the steps outlined below you should be able use the tools, documents and videos to help configure your Outlook client to protect you from losing mail once the retention policy is enacted.

Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Set up local archiving

To ensure against losing any data to the retention policy it is highly recommended that everyone set up local archiving on their primary computer. The instructions for doing this can be downloaded here:

Setting Up Local Archiving in Office 2007                  Setting Up Local Archiving in Office 2010
Office 2007 Auto-archive Video                               Office 2010 Auto-archive Video