Specific Chats not deleting as per retention policy

[LambyUK]

Hi all, anybody else seeing this issue?...

We enabled a retention policy back in June to allow us to delete all Teams chats between users older than 24 hours. In the whole the policy works well, although it does sometimes take 7 days for the chats to disappear from our teams clients (as per MS documents). That part isnt an issue for us as we know we are at the mercy of the MS server and its processing capabilities. 

However, there seems to have been a 2 day period (21st/22nd July) where all chat on those dates has remained present in our Teams desktop, web and mobile clients. Today is the 3rd of August so we are coming up close to 2 weeks now and yet these particular chats remain. Anybody have any ideas why? Or how we can force remove these messages from clients? I believe as they are still present in all forms of the client that they must still exist on the server too and would therefore be searchable via a compliance/discovery search?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

I’d create a ticket with Microsoft to sort this out since this is a interruption of the retention rules you set up

Adam

[#3]

I am also facing the same issue, I have configured retention policy for deleting chat messages which are older than 1 day but still they are showing, Kindly let us know if found any solution. @LambyUK 

[#4]

@Ravi1393 The support ticket I opened with MS told me this was a known internal issue with how the chat retention worked from the ground up. They then even released an official MS article stating that the issue was recognised and worked on. They developed a new way of chat retention pruning and released it into Teams over a month ago now and since then all of my old chats were indeed purged and all is good now.

[#5]

@LambyUKthank you for response.

Can you share that links where they share new way of chat retention pruning. Might be I will get some solution. One more thing I want to confirm with you - When we create a retention policy for a team with condition as delete chat which are older than 1 day, so it will delete all the messages which are older than 1 day (as per shared document by Microsoft) or It will take up to 7 day to take effect in Teams.

I have created policy like - 

[#6]

@Ravi1393 So the policy I have mainly deletes after 24 hours. However, MS do say that depending on server load they may not actually show as gone from your client for upto 7 days or even more in some cases. This particular issue we had though was chats from July were still showing in September which clearly wasnt expected behaviour.

As for the MS advisory, I cannot find the official article now as my o365 health section only shows advisories from the past 30 days.