Is it possible to set retention policies on Personal Archive mailboxes? The plan is to have a 90 day retention policy for the mailbox, and force the user to archive e-mails they need to keep, rather than auto archiving for them. We then want to set up a 5 year retention policy for the archive mailbox. But I have not found a way to build an RPT for the archive mailbox. Or do I just need to write a PS that deletes any messages in the archive mailbox that are over 5 years? Then run that PS periodically (monthly)

No, you can't apply the Retention policy on Archive Mailbox.Gulab | MCTS-MCITP Messaging: 2010 | MCTS-MCITP Messaging: 2007 | MCC 2011 | Skype: Gulab.Mallah

Gulab is right ! Have a look of below technet article in detail to understand this.. Understanding Retention Tags and Retention Policies: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd297955.aspx Understanding Recoverable Items: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee364755.aspxAnil

That's what I was afraid of. So it looks like I need to write a couple of Power Shell scripts that clean up the archive mailbox for me. Based on my 2 hours of Power Shell experience I will need to use the Export-Mailbox cmdlet to accomplish this. Once I get it written I will post it on this thread, in case it can help anyone else. Thank you for your help Gulab and Anil.

After digging through PowerShell for a week I was unable to find a script that could remove e-mails from the Archive by date using PowerShell. But I did find that I am able to apply retention policies to the Archive folder, and I have been able to successfully test this. So my goal was to have a 90 day policy on the Inbox and a 5 year policy on the Archive mailbox. To do this I just had to build a handful of 90 RPT's for: Deleted Items, Drafts, Inbox, Journal, Junk Mail, Outbox, Personal Folder, RSS Feeds, Sent Items, Sync Issues. From there I build another 5 year RPT and apply it to All other folders in the mailbox. This All other folders in the mailbox includes the Archive mailbox. Please in the future only post responses that you know are correct, or that you have tested. I burned a weeks worth of work trying to find another way to handle this. It wasn't until I had not found another solution that I tried to use the policies again (by that time I had learned a whole lot more about them) and they worked. I also gained a lot of knowledge about the difference between RTM and SP1 PowerShell cmdlets. I hope this can help someone else out in the future.

Awesome Ken, Congratulation for your hard work on it. You know why Retention Policy is applied for Archive Mailbox, because MS has introduced Archive Mailbox Feature for PST not to store regulary emails. As in Exchange 2010 you can use Cheap Disk as well for the storage. What ever you did is awesome no doubt about it. Cheers,Gulab | MCTS-MCITP Messaging: 2010 | MCTS-MCITP Messaging: 2007 | MCC 2011 | Skype: Gulab.Mallah