Office retention policies provide users and Office 365 administrators an easy way to archive outdated messages in a user’s mailbox as well as protect the data privacy of the message sender.  Organizational policy may require destruction of messages and customer private data after a maximum period of time.  For compliance reasons, data should only be retained for a minimal (recovery) period after the message’s processing use is complete.

Systematic retention policies support automatic processing for an item after a certain period of time. Office 365 retention policies, for example, can be used to automatically remove email items older than a specified date from a user’s mailbox.


By default, retention policies apply to the Deleted Items and Junk Mail folders to automatically remove items that are older than 30 days.


Users can manually set retention tags for folders. For example, if you want to automatically delete messages from a folder named SalesEmails after one year; you can manually set the Retention/Archiving Tags for email items using your Office 365 mailbox.

  1. Login to Office 365 at: Office.com
  2. Select the Outlook mail App
  • In the mail interface, right-click on the folder or email message for which you want to change Retention/Archive settings.
  • Select a policy from the list.  Note that by default a folder’s retention policy settings are inherited from the parent folder (Use parent folder policy).  This setting helps enforce a consistent policy for folders and sub-folders which likely contain similar content requiring the same retention terms.


If an existing retention policy does not match watch you need, you can define your own custom retention policy.

  1. Select Settings > Options, then Go to Automatic processing > Retention policies
  2. Click the “+” button and create your own custom retention policy
  • After you have created a policy, you can go back and apply your new custom retention policy to the required items in Office 365



The Office 365 administrator can create custom Retention tags and Retention Policies and assign them to user mailboxes.  Administrators use the “Office 365 Security & Compliance Center” to create policies for the Governance and Archival of messages.  These policies help ensure that default policies are consistent across an organization’s Office 365 domain.