You said "none of the emails are being removed/deleted."
You will need to setup and schedule or manually run the Storage Expiry. The default schedule is "never".
This is done on the Site properties in EV 2007.
As the above poster stated, this can be setup using Modified Date or Archived Date.
Storage Expiry runs according to the schedule that you define on this screen, checking through archives for items whose Retention Periods have expired and deleting them.
Storage Expiry does not delete mailbox shortcuts to the items that it deletes. There is a separate method, "shortcut deletion", for deleting shortcuts that no longer point to archived items. Click the Shortcut Deletion tab to set up shortcut deletion.
Storage Expiry is carried out by the Storage Service.
Base Expiry on:
Modified date. Items in archives expire at the end of the Retention Period.
When you select Modified date, the start of the Retention Period is calculated as follows:
For mail messages, this is the time since the message was received.
For documents, it is the time since the document was last modified.
Archived date. Items in archives expire at the end of the Retention Period. When you select Archived date, the start of the Retention Period is the date the items were archived. This setting is useful if you import old items from other mail systems. If the items are very old and deleted items expire on sent/received date, the items could expire immediately.
