Email archiving

With email archiving, all emails in your Microsoft 365 organization are retained in an external archive that is stored in the cloud, allowing you to achieve compliance and respond to eDiscovery requests. New emails are added to the archive continuously, as they are sent or received, and cannot be modified or manually deleted.

The emails are shown in two folders for each user mailbox – Incoming and Outgoing. In each folder, the emails are sorted chronologically, from most recent to the oldest.

The archive is encrypted with the AES-256 algorithm. Only authorized users can access the archive, in accordance to their access level, and an audit trail for all actions is available.

On top of the compliance-related functionality, email archiving provides backup and recovery functionality.

You can perform the following actions:

  • Browse the archive
  • Search for specific messages by using ad-hoc search queries and saved search queries
  • Preview emails without recovering them
  • Recover specific emails, the Incoming and Outgoing folders, and whole mailboxes to the original or a non-original mailbox
  • Download email attachments

By default, all emails are kept in the archive indefinitely. To delete emails that you no longer need, you can apply retention rules. When the retention period, the emails are automatically deleted. You cannot manually delete emails from the archive.

To keep specific emails in the archive, regardless of any retention rules, you can apply legal hold rules. During the legal hold period, these emails cannot be deleted.

For example, you can configure retention rules or legal hold rules for emails from a specific sender, emails to a specific recipient, or emails with a specific word in the subject.

Limitations

  • Only licensed mailboxes are included in the archive. Shared mailboxes, to which a license is not assigned, are not included in the archive.
  • The maximum size of an email that can be included in the archive is 150 MB, due to a Microsoft limitation.
  • Draft emails are not included in the archive.

  • You can apply one archiving plan to one mail server.