Vault store deletion - just looking for confirmation

AndrewB - thanks for that reminder!  I had forgotten about the Advanced Search...  With almost 700,000 items to delete, that is STILL going to suck unless there's yet a better way.  There has to be other companies that have ingested legacy email that need to do this kind of thing as well.

I'll give it until mid next week and then mark your answer as the solution if no one comes up with something better.

Well if Storage Expiry is based on the Modified Date cant you just run Expiry for mail older than 6 years?  When you did the migration the received date should have stayed the same.

If you have a look in the Help for Storage Expiry it says this:-

When you select modified date, the start of the Retention period is calculated as follows:-
- For Mail message, this is the time since the message was received.
- For documents, it is the time since the document was last modified."

Tony, I should be able to do that but I don't think I can.  Where my trouble comes in is with retention categories.

No one had deceided on a retention period initially, so all email was archived with a retention category of business which is set to "forever".  For the items that are in the main vault store, if I change the retention category called business to "older than six years" that still doesn't really take care of things.  My assumption is that if I apply a new rentention policy to delete items older than six years, we will begin deleting email older than six years as each day ticks by which, at the moment, isn't what's been communicated to me.

It's my understanding they want to keep emails from January 1, 2007 and forward.  If I apply the older than six years policy, come January 2nd 2013, we'll lose January 1,2007 emails.  On January 3rd 2013, we'll lose  January 2nd, 2007 emails, etc.

Not intending to be a pain but I don't see where I have an option to specify a calendar date for retention - I feel like that should be an option.

retention settings in EV go by "older than" like you describe. so in theory, what you could do is turn of your expiry schedule once you hit the retention "date" that you're reaching for.

AndrewB,

I did think about that but was trying to figure out how long the storage expiry will need to run before it cleans out those items - and - would I end up needing to leave the policy for expiration applied past the one-day window that I have available to run it? 

there are so many factors that influence expiry, there's really no way to tell how long it's going to take to run. most likely, 1 day wont be enough.

Your mileage may vary but the expiry rate in the performance doc says this:

Tony/Andrew - Thanks for your assistance with this.  If you don't mind indulging me just a little longer... So, it sounds like the plan for me is to create a new retention category that will expire items older than six years and apply the policy to the journal vault store on the day we want expiry to start sifting through the emails.  We should then shut it off before the followind day to make sure we don't delete items forward of the December 31st, 2006 mark.

Assuming it makes it through most of the emails we want to expire, I may only have a small chunk of emails I'll need to manually delete via the web interface.  I guess my remaining question, assuming all of the above is correct, is does the retention category need to "reclassify" all the emails in the journal vault store before it will be able to start expiry?  Meaning, once I change the retention category on the journal vault store, does EV need to go through all the emails in the store first to determine which will expire and be deleted AND THEN it goes through and deletes them later?  I'm just wondering, do I need to apply the new retention category over the weekend so it has time to flag emails to be expired before it will actually delete them on January 1?