How Long Does Office 365 Keep Deleted Emails? Let's Unfold

Knowing how long does Office 365 keep deleted emails is necessary to enhance data security. There are several situations in organizations when the data gets deleted by the employees mistakenly. Then we do not know if the deleted data remains in the Office 365 account or if it will be permanently deleted. In that situation, multiple questions are aroused in the mind

Is it a secure way to store data in Office 365? How to get the deleted data back in Office 365?

What Happens When an Email is Deleted in Outlook?

Let’s go through the journey when the email is deleted in Outlook. There is a Deleted Items folder in Outlook that stores the deleted emails. This stores the emails for 30 days and after that period, the deleted emails go to the Recoverable Items Folder. The deleted emails will stay there for 14 days. During that duration, one can easily recover them if one wants.

How Long Does Office 365 Keep Deleted Emails?

There is a feature of the retention policy in Outlook states that how long we need to store the deleted emails.

Usually, the deleted emails are moved to the Deleted Items for 30 days, if someone recovered did not them from that location then they will be moved to the Recoverable Items Folder and kept there for 14 days.

So, if we calculate the overall period of the retention policy is 44 days. After the last stage (Recoverable items folder) the emails will be deleted permanently. And, no one can restore them.

How to Change the Retention Settings in Outlook?

There are different steps to change the retention policy as per the Outlook version.

Steps for Outlook 2019 to modify the retention settings

1. Log in to your Outlook and provide the details of the account.

2. Hit the File option and choose Options.

3. Now select the Advanced option.

4. Then move to the Mailbox Cleanup and hit the AutoArchive Settings.

5. Now finalize the folders to archive and other settings then OK and Save.

Changing the Retention Settings on Outlook on the web

1. Move to Settings > View all Outlook settings.

2. Now go to Mail > Automatic processing > Retention policies.

3. Now, create retention tags and also specify what will happen after the deletion of an email.

4. Lastly, click OK to apply the changes.

Is the Deleted Folder Automatically Cleaned Out?

Let’s discuss is the deleted folder was automatically cleaned out or not. It is just an option that can enabled or disabled as per the requirement.

Follow the below steps to disable or enable the status of the deleted folder automatically cleaned up.

1. Move to the Outlook Web App > Choose settings > Go to options.

2. After that move to the Mail and then Message Options.

3. Now you can choose what you want whether the deleted folder is automatically cleaned out or not.

4. Then enable or disable the option as per requirement.

Due to this, most of the SharePoint users copy document library to another SharePoint site to prevent data loss. 

What Else Do You Know?

According to the cruciality of the data, we can determine that data security is a must in any situation. Relying only on the cloud platform for the security of our data is not a good approach. So we should use the SysTools Most Recommended Office 365 Backup Tool to store the data of Office 365 locally. This is one of the prominent tools to take the backup of Office 365. Below are the essential steps of the tool.

Step 1. Download and Choose Source & Destination platforms.

Step 2. Enable the email option.

Step 3. Complete and Validate Source & Destination details.

Step 4. Add users and Start the Backup process.

Conclusion

In this detailed write-up, we have explained the most asked query on the Internet “How long does Office 365 keep deleted emails”. The steps to modify the retention policy are also explained in a detailed manner.