How to Create Dynamically Adjusting Exchange Retention Policies

Exchange has supported message retention policies since Exchange 2010. Retention Policies are collections of Retention Tags that dictate how emails are retained in Exchange. Usually this is done to comply with business policies on data retention and/or used as a way to move data from the user's primary mailbox to an archive mailbox.

Retention Policies

The retention policy shown above includes several personal policy tags and one default policy tag that moves emails older than 6 months to the archive. You can customize or create new retention policies for your users based on your company's data retention policies. For example, you can create a retention policy to move all emails to the archive mailbox after 1 year and permanently delete all emails older than 5 years.

Only one mailbox retention policy can be assigned to a mailbox at a time. While you can easily change which retention policy is assigned to a mailbox using the the Exchange Management Shell or the Exchange Admin Center, this can be somewhat tedious.

Note that retention tags are time-based, not size-based. If you're trying to manage your mailbox storage with retention policies the same time-based retention policy may result in widely varying mailbox sizes within the Exchange database store, depending on the user. I developed the following process to dynamically adjust user's retention policy based on mailbox size. The larger the mailbox gets, the more aggressive the retention policy applied.

Start by creating multiple default archive and/or delete retention tags. Make sure to select "applied automatically to entire mailbox (default)" to ensure that it applies to all email items. For example,

• Default one year move to archive
• Default 6 months move to archive
• Default 3 months move to archive
• Default 7 year delete
• Default 5 year delete
• Default 3 year delete

Creating a Default retention tag

Next create multiple retention policies that include the default retention tags you created. For example,

• High Retention - Default one year move to archive, Default 7 year delete
• Medium Retention - Default 6 months move to archive, Default 5 year delete
• Low Retention - Default 3 months move to archive, Default 3 year delete

Apply the High Retention policy to all mailboxes using the following EMS command:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Set-Mailbox -RetentionPolicy "High Retention"

Note that archive retention tags only apply if the mailbox has an archive mailbox, otherwise the archive tags are ignored.

Copy the following script and save it to one of your Exchange servers in the C:\Scripts folder as Apply-RetentionPolicies.ps1:

$mbx = Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited
$mbx | ForEach-Object -Process {
$size = ( Get-MailboxStatistics $_.Alias ).TotalItemSize
If ( $size -gt "10GB" ) {
  Set-Mailbox $_.Alias -RetentionPolicy "Low Retention Policy"
  }
elseif ( $size -gt "8GB" ) {
  Set-Mailbox $_.Alias -RetentionPolicy "Medium Retention Policy"
  }
else {
  Set-Mailbox $_.Alias -RetentionPolicy "High Retention Policy"
  }
}

Adjust the mailbox sizes in the script to meet your company's retention needs. In the example script above mailboxes greater than 10GB get the Low Retention Policy, mailboxes between 8-10GB get the Medium Retention Policy, and everyone else gets the High Retention Policy.

Next, create a scheduled task that runs the Apply-RetentionPolicies.ps1 script once per day.

Set the "Program/Script" property to:

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe

And set the "Add arguments (optional)" to:

-NonInteractive -WindowStyle Hidden -command $ep = (Get-Item env:"ExchangeInstallPath").Value; . $ep\bin\RemoteExchange.ps1; Connect-ExchangeServer -auto; . C:\Scripts\Apply-RetentionPolicies.ps1

Creating a Basic Scheduled Task

The scheduled task must run using the credentials of an account with Organization Management rights.

With this process, as a mailbox gets smaller from a more aggressive retention policy it will automatically get a longer retention policy.