How to leverage Front & Microsoft 365 retention policies to manage mailbox storage limits

For companies that receive high volumes of email, managing inbox storage is a lose-lose scenario. Companies could manually manage inbox capacity and/or purchase costly licenses to increase storage limits but even with that approach, there is a limit. Inevitably, companies will have to delete old emails which the team might need in the future. 

Before we get into the solution, it's important to understand two key principles about how Front works. First, every email/communication that is sent to Front is replicated and stored separately on Front's servers. This allows Front to associate unique data - comments, assignments, tags - to the email itself. Second, Front does not impose limits on the amount of customer data we will store.

1. Before creating the retention policy, you'll need to first enable the In-Place Archive setting for the mailbox you wish to create the retention policy for. More information on how to do that can be found here.

2. Navigate to the Exchange Compliance Management page in the Classic Exchange Admin Center (you'll need to be a Microsoft Admin).

3. From there, navigate to the Retention Tags tab.

4. Under the Retention Tags tab, you'll create two retention tags. The first retention tag will move emails to the online archive mailbox after X time period. The second retention tag will delete emails after Y time period.
   *The time period for the move to archive retention tag needs to be shorter than the deletion retention tag

5. Once the retention tags have been created, navigate to the Retention Policies tab and create a new retention policy that includes the two retention tags you created in the previous step.
   *Clearly name your retention policy so it's easy to identify in the future

6. Once your retention policy has been created, navigate to Recipients and locate the mailbox you wish to apply the retention policy to. 

7. You can apply the retention policy by editing the mailbox > mailbox features > update the Retention policy to the new policy you created in the previous step.

8. Save this retention policy to complete this workflow. 
    

• Learn about Retention Policies and Labels

• Create and Configure Retention Policies