Legal Hold rules allow to mark as hold some emails in order to prevent deletion.

What Legal Hold rules do

When a Legal Hold rule applies on an email, this email cannot be deleted until the configured retention time expires. This means that:

• the administrators cannot manually delete the email
• retention rules cannot delete the email

How Legal Hold rules work

All the configured Legal Hold rules are applied every 15 minutes. When an emails is marked as hold, all the retention rules are skipped.

Saved Search

In order to identify the set of emails to apply the Legal Hold rule on, you must provide a saved search. This search must be saved as global.

Retention time

By setting the retention time, you can set the amount of time the retention lock will be in place for the matching saved search criteria. You can set Maximum volume retention in order to deny emails deletion until the volume retention time expired. Otherwise, you can specify the number of days after which the retention lock will be removed.

Configuration

When configuring a Legal Hold rule you must provide a name, the global saved search and the retention time. Some additional notes can be added, too. When selecting the saved search, the number of matching emails is computed. When selecting the retention time, the number of affected emails is computed, too.