About Retention Management

Last published : Apr 17, 2026
From the Retention Management section, you can manage the settings and polices that determine how long archived messages are retained in Arctera Insight Archiving. By default, Arctera Insight Archiving retains archived messages indefinitely (although this is not recommended since it will result in Storage overages in future). If required, you can configure Arctera Insight Archiving to collect archived messages for removal after those messages have been retained for a defined retention period.
The default retention period is a global setting that determines how long archived messages are retained before they are collected for removal. After you configure the global retention period and enable the storage expiry setting, the collection of archived messages for removal begins. During the daily collection events, any messages that have been retained for longer than the default retention period are scheduled for removal 14 days later. The Retention Administrator receives daily notification emails during the 14-day grace period informing them of the number of archived messages that are scheduled for removal.
Note: Any archived messages that have a matter-level, search-level, or message-level legal hold applied from Arctera Insight eDiscovery are not removed.
Beyond the global retention period, the retention period for archived messages can be modified by creating retention policies to associate with the following policy targets. See Supported retention scenarios for WORM and non-WORM Insight Archiving customers.
  • Managed Tags-based retention: A global tag that you create and assign to users. Once you create a managed tag and associate a retention policy, users can apply the tag to archived messages to modify their retention period. The retention period of the associated retention policy determines how long tagged messages are retained in Arctera Insight Archiving.
  • Active Directory Groups and Distribution List based retention: The Active Directory Groups or Distribution List are synchronized using provisioning services. Associating a retention policy with the active directory groups or distribution list modify the retention period of the archived messages for all members of that group or list. The retention period of the associated retention policy determines how long the messages for the members are retained in Arctera Insight Archiving.
  • Classification-based retention: The retention period applied to items during archiving is determined by several factors. See Supported retention scenarios for WORM and non-WORM Insight Archiving customers.. Retention is applied in the following order:
    • If a classification-based retention policy is not applied to the item, then the longest retention policy among the multiple applicable retention policies gets applied to it.
    • If a classification-based retention policy is applied to the item, and this classification policy has an associated retention policy, then retention of that item is determined by the retention policy associated with the applied classification policy. Classification-based retention supersedes retention set by other means, irrespective of whether it is shorter or longer than any other applicable retention policies for that item.
In the above-mentioned example, if the item is responsive to more than one classification policy with associated retention policies, then the longest retention policy is applied. Classification-based retention supersedes retention set by other means as mentioned above.
Related information