Keep All Email for Two Years

[Rob Nunley]

Hi All,

I am in a hybrid environment with Exchange 2016. All mailboxes have been migrated to EOL. I would like to create a retention policy that would prevent a user from permanently deleting emails.  I've read a lot of MS documentation but I'm still unclear if this is possible.  Our current retention policy deletes after two years but I don't know if a user permanently deletes an email if that email is retained for discovery requests up to that two year mark? Is there a MS solution for this? Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Just to clarify, are you talking about Exchange Online retention policy, or Office 365 retention policy? The former do not actually prevent users from deleting messages. Use a retention policy from the Compliance center instead (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/retention?view=o365-worldwide), in which case the messages will be preserved as mentioned by Adin above.

[#3]

Thanks for the replies! Both were very helpful.