TL; DR: Auto-Archiving for Exchange Online is being rolled out in October 2025 for all public clouds and in November for all government clouds. If archiving is already enabled for Exchange Online use...
Published Oct 07, 2025
Version 1.0
Blog Post
Nino_Bilic
Microsoft
MicrosoftCan you help me understand this a bit more:
In which scenario would you want to disable this (with understanding that the alternative of time-based archiving is that the user runs out of mailbox quota and has disruption of service)?
We allow our users great leeway in determining when items move to their archive. By default, it's 3 years. But they can choose a longer tag for a folder instead. Such as 5 years. We mainly do this because some user, particularly VIPs, have delegates and once an email gets moved to their archive, the delegate loses access. So our VIPs can choose sensitive folders to retain items longer, so their delegates will continue to access them.
We've trained our users to expect when they put a 5 year tag on something, it's going to stay there for at least 5 years.
Now, those folders they've chosen a longer archive date for are going to be the first things that disappear to this new policy. I hope you can understand why that puts us admins in a difficult position. It's also terribly problematic that it's predominantly going to affect our VIP users. The users who have the most power and influence and make spending decisions. It's incredibly awkward.