All,
In consultation with IU’s Office of the Vice President & General Counsel, Exchange Online administrators have reduced the retention duration of recoverable deleted items to 7 days. Recoverable deleted items are different than the “deleted items” folder, additional details are below. This change went into effect at 4pm on 3/17/2021. Items that are already older than 7 days have been purged.
Accounts that are still on traditional Exchange hosted by IU are not currently affected. The new policy will apply once those accounts migrate to Exchange Online.
Recoverable deleted items are most easily found in Outlook for Windows by clicking on the “Deleted items” folder, then clicking the “Recover Deleted Items from Server” button in the ribbon. Additional information about recovering deleted items from OWA as well as additional information about recoverable item retention are available in the KB. [1]
The most common ways that items end up in the Recoverable deleted items area are:
- The client deleted an item from the deleted items folder.
- The client has a rule to purge their deleted items folder on the close of Outlook.
- The client presses Shift+Delete to delete an item. This bypasses the normal deleted items folder.
Exchange Online administrators strongly encourage clients to utilize the regular deleted items folder and to practice regular archiving of their content. Recoverable deleted items are intended only as a last-resort recovery option.
If there are additional questions, please contact SCT2 at sct2@iu.edu.
–IT Community Partnerships on behalf of Campus Communications Infrastructure