Retention rules are a way to delete emails on the LibraCyber Email Archiver.

Once you configure a retention rule, you can review the list of the emails the retention rule is going to delete.

Message expiry

Each email archived in the LibraCyber Email Archiver has an expiry date associated with it. This is the date when the message will be deleted from the Archiver.

By default new messages that are archived have no expiry date set and they will be deleted based on the retention time of the volume.

Example:

The tenant has two volumes, VOL1 and VOL2
VOL1 has a retention time of 365 days, VOL2 has an infinite retention time
Messages will be deleted from VOL1 after 365 days and will never be deleted from VOL2

So, by default all new messages that are archived have no expiry date set and only the volume retention time defines how long they are retained. If at least one volume has an infinite retention time, they will be retained forever.

You can change the retention time of each message through the retention rules.

How a retention rule works

A retention rule is a way to set the retention time for messages that match a saved search, so in order to create a retention rule you need a saved search.

This saved search must be of type “global“. A global saved search always returns all the messages of the tenant that match the search criteria, while normal saved searches only return messages related to the user that executes them.

You can find more details in the documentation about saved searches, in this context all you need to know is that you need a “global“ saved search to create a retention rule.

How a retention rule is applied

The retention rules are executed every night and they are executed in the specified priority order.

This is what happens when a retention rule is run:

The saved search is executed and all the messages that match the saved search are analyzed
For each message the expiry time is set accordingly to the retention rule unless it already has an expiry time configured
If the expiry time is already configured it is updated only if the new expiry time is bigger: the expiry time already associated to the message is never decreased

NOTE: you need at least one volume with a retention time equal or bigger than the retention time that you want to configure with the retention rule because messages are always deleted from volumes after the maximum retention time of the volume. If you don’t have any volume with a sufficient retention time the Archiver will show a warning.

When a retention rule is applied

Retention rules are applied nightly.

By default, retention rules do NOT delete emails before than 7 days from the retention rule last update. This is done for security reason and to prevent from accidental deletion due to wrong retention rule configuration. So, when you deal with retention rule, please consider that:

a new configured retention rule will be inactive for the first 7 days
any update on a retention rule will make the retention rule inactive for 7 days

Forcing a retention rule execution

In case of need, it's possible to bypass the 7-days protection and to force retention rules to be executed immediately.

This can be done through the Force retention rules to be applied now option from the hypervisor console (for on-premise customers) or by raising a ticket to support@libraesva.com for LibraCyber cloud customers.

NOTE: when forcing retention rules to be applied, retention rules updated in the last 2 hours will NOT delete any email

NOTE: forcing retention rules execution requires OTP if configured

Configuration

Basically a retention rule connects a saved search to a define retention time.

When configuring a retention rule you can set a descriptive name and some optional notes.

The priority is used to determine the order according to which the retention rules should be applied. The maximum available priority is 1.

A saved search must be chosen from the available one. The saved search will be used to determine the list of emails on which the retention rule should be applied.

NOTE: remember that the saved search must be saved as a global saved search

The retention time defines the time to be used to set the expiry date of the emails. By choosing Maximum volume retention the expiry date of the emails will be determine by the volume retention. Otherwise the emails will be deleted after the configured number of days.

Notifications

The Archiver always send an email notification whenever:

a new retention rule has been created
an existent retention rule has been updated
a retention rule has been deleted

These types of notification are sent to the tenant administrator and to the tenant privacy officer.

Practical usage

You can find some practical usage at this page.