Best way to keep emails for 7 years?

[Velvis]

A user for some reason deleted a bunch of emails a few months back from 2023 instead of archiving them and now realizes she needs them. I am guessing they are long gone. The business manager informed me they now want to keep all emails for 7 years.

What's the best way to implement this using M365?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

One method...auto expanding archive...take the work out of it for end users, it just happens in the back ground.
Another method...use Retention Policies, and/ or Litigation Hold.

 

[Markverhyden]

So who provides email?

Was this an actual enforcement event? In other words was the user who the deleted emails actually result in problems? Or the manager just realize that all business records need to be kept for 7 years just in case something does come up.

Either way the real issue is taking the matter out of the hands of EU's so no mistakes are made. Exchange has Litigation Hold as an automated method. Gmail has the ability to download email to a local device. Otherwise you'll have to pay someone to provide the service.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@YeOldeStonecat, already covered the bases. Enable auto-expanding archive on the tenant, enable it on each mailbox, make sure you keep enabling it as you're making new mailboxes because the default doesn't always propagate.

The only thing further is depending on the customer, it may be less expensive to deploy a Datto SaaS Backup like solution to archive the entire tenant, than it is to get into DLP settings and test labels. The impact of a misconfigured retention label can be hard to fix! So when a customer comes to me with a retention window, my default is Datto SaaS. I can have business owners / stake holders searching Datto's backups much more easily than mucking around with eDiscovery.

I love M365, and Exchange Online, but this is one area where it's just horrible.

 

[HCHTech]

We have a clients that use Synology's Active Backup for M365 and one that uses their Active Backup for Google Workspace. I haven't had to dig out an accidentally deleted email on eiither platform, but I have had to get files from history and it worked without an issue any time I had to do it. We typically set these up with backup to a B2 bucket, so offsite is covered as well.