Because the server space devoted to the university's e-mail system is necessarily limited, e-mail items in individual email users' accounts are eventually purged. Faculty, staff and student accounts retain messages for 180 days after receipt.  All messages older than 180 days for faculty, staff or students are subject to deletion. This limitation pertains to ALL mail in the user's account, including messages in all folders, not just the Mailbox. Moving mail into the Cabinet or predefined folders will not protect the items from deletion. Faculty and staff who wish to keep mail older than the retention limits should archive it. Students should save older messages to disk.

About Archiving Items

The archive feature saves mail or phone messages, appointments, reminder notes, and tasks to a designated database on a local drive. Archiving items saves network space and keeps your Mailbox uncluttered. It also protects items from being automatically deleted. You can view archived items whenever you need by choosing File | Open Archive from the GroupWise menu bar. Repeat those steps to return to your current list of e-mail items. When you archive a Sent Item, you will no longer be able to track the status of that item.

Archive Settings

Archiving is enabled by default for faculty and staff email accounts. E-mail items 45 days or older are automatically archived to the C: drive. These settings retain messages that would otherwise be deleted after the 180 day retention limit. Faculty and staff can change the default archive settings, but we do not recommend changing the default archive limit to more than 180 days. Faculty and staff may also manually archive an item or unarchive an item at any time.

Archiving is not enabled for student email accounts. Students who wish to keep e-mail items older than the retention limit of 180 days should save those items to disk.

Junk Mail and Trash Folders

Items in the Junk Mail folder are automatically moved to the Trash folder after 30 days. Many items are automatically moved to the Junk Mail folder by the email servers after being marked [SPAM] by Spam Assassin. While Spam Assassin is mostly accurate in its assessment of spam mail, it is not perfect; some messages that are not spam may get sent to your Junk Mail folder. You should review the items in that folder periodically to find messages you might want to keep. Move those messages to another folder to avoid losing them.

Items placed in the Trash folder are automatically deleted by a process that is run every weekend. That process deletes items that are 7 days old or older. Because that process runs only on weekends it is possible to have items in your Trash folder for up to 13 days.

Policy on Critical E-mail and E-mail Recovery

If an email account is deleted, no email or archived email from that account can be recovered. If you work with email critical to the Institution's function (e.g., financial records, legal documents), we recommend that you save that email as a file or print that email to hard copy.

Backups

All email servers are backed up on a daily basis and saved for three days. The backups are for disaster recovery purposes only, i.e., total loss of the server. The backups will not be used for the recovery of lost email. Retaining email is left to the individual user, who may archive, print, or save  e-mail items.

HISTORY

 July 7, 2007: Initial Policy

 October 29, 2012: Annual Review for PCI Compliance

 October 29, 2012 Removed references to Groupwise

 Author: UISO

Version: 1.1