EV 11.0.1 Retention Periods

Hi All,

I'm looking for some guideness.

We have had our default retention period set for 7 years since day 1 of our setup, however we have never enabled the function to automatically delete expired items. We have also allowed our users to manually delete items if they wish. We have been running EV since 2010 and we have seen our storage needs grow quite considerability and now we wish to enable to automatic deletion of expired items. 

Before I enabled this option I read quite a few posts about if I lower the retention period on the same "default" retention period and hence not creating or new one then the emails shall delete I.E it will pick up the new period I set and expire items older then the new value of 4 years. So what I did, was change the default retention period from 7 to 4, setup the storage expiry in the Site Settings to expire based on Archived Date and set up the schedule (also made sure that prevent items to be deleted in the retention catergroy wasn't ticked); I then restarted the EV services and did a report now. The report now showed nothing would be deleted, in the Event Log it doesn't show any items to be deleted:

======Event Log=======

Number of vaults processed: 754 
Number of vaults enabled for expiry: 754 
Total number of expired items deleted: 0 
Total number of items that could not be deleted: 0 
 
Items marked with sent\received date based retention categories have been deleted: 
(none)
 
Items marked with archived date based retention categories have been deleted: 
(none)

===================

 

So I thought, I would reboot the server and let the process run over night with the schedule that I set up, after coming back in I had the same problem, with the Event Log showing the task was completed but with no emails deleted.

So I then ran an re-build index on just my mailbox (which worked no problems) and tried a run now again and same problem, no emails were deleted. I have emails still showing older then the retention period.

I have an Exchange (which is 2007) retention policy to delete emails only in the deleted items folder after 30 days, this works no problem and I see that when the storage expiry task runs, it deletes emails matching this policy. 

Is there something I'm missing for default retention period?

Thanks Jason