GroupWise E-mail Retention Policy
Because the server space devoted to the GroupWise e-mail system is necessarily limited, e-mail items in individual GroupWise 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 GroupWise 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 GroupWise 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 GroupWise 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 GroupWise 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 GroupWise 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 a GroupWise account is deleted, no e-mail or archived e-mail from that account can be recovered. If you work with e-mail critical to the Institution's function (e.g., financial records, legal documents), we recommend that you save that e-mail as a file or print that e-mail to hard copy.
GroupWise Backups
All GroupWise e-mail 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 e-mail. Retaining e-mail is left to the individual user, who may archive, print, or save e-mail items.