Modified Date vs Archived Date

[Narma]

If we initially setup a policy for retention category based on the Archived Date.  After a month if we change that to Modified Date what will happen to the messages which are already archived?

Ex 1: Based on Archived Date  Retention Period 5 years - If the Message from Jan,1 2000 is archived on 2006 January it will be deleted on 2011 Jan. But on 2007 if we change the policy Based on "Modified Date" what will happen to that message ? Will that be deleted immediately or it still will be kept until 2011 Jan according to the old policy. 

Ex 2: Modified Date with Retention Period 5 years : If a user noticed that the user's mail is going to be deleted in another 15 days and he restored the message to inbox. The archive will be deleted after 15 days but the message what he restored will be archived again and will be there for another 5 years becasue the modified date is changed ? Same this will happen even if it is based on the archived date?

Thank you. 

[Kopfjager · Accepted solution]

Changes on the retention policies themselves are retroactive.  So in the Example 1.,  the item would be expired and would be deleted during the next Storage Expiry run.

This is because the savesets entries reference the Retention Category table which tells it whether to use Modified or Archived date.  So in this example, it will see that it is using the Modified date now (IDDateTime) as it queries the Retention Cat table and then compare IDDateTime with the the retention period and determine it is expired.

The only thing on the saveset entry related to retention is the Retention Category ID. 

IE;   Today my saveset has a retention category ID of 1  My message was 3 years old and archived a week ago.

Retention Category ID 1 currently has table entries for 6 years and expiry based on Archived date.

So when expiry runs today, it compares the Archived date of the saveset with the time units from the Retention and determines it is still not expired.

Tomorrow if I change Retention 1 to Modified date and 2 years, that is what the saveset will see when the DB is queried and now my item is beyond that date and is expired.

What doesnt change is when an entirely new Retention Category is applied.  Say Retention ID 2 is created and set.  that will apply to all new messages coming in but the existing savesets that had Retention 1 will still be Retenion 1 and use the settings from it.

Message Edited by Paul Strittmatter on 08-14-2008 06:10 PM

[Narma]

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.