What is the reasoning behind not being able to apply a move to the Inbox and other default folders. I would like to move items to the archive mailbox after a year. I don't want to have to rely on a user to move it to a Personal Folder first. Is this possible?

I seriously don't understand what you are asking.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

I can't do a move to archive on my inbox. What is the reasoning for this? (Just out of curiousity) So if I can't do a move to archive on my inbox and other default folders, how do I archive them? I don't want to have to setup personal folder policies and rely on users to move emails to folders.

What Exchange version, service pack and rollup hotfix level are you running? What exactly are you doing and exactly what error messages do you get? Have you created an archive mailbox?Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 2. I havent' tried anything yet, just reading various technet articles and such. Yes, I've created an archive mailbox in a seperate store. I did end up trying to run a retention policy against my mailbox just to see and you can't move messages directly from your inbox to an archive mailbox. I get the following error: Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed. Elapsed time: 00:00:00 Inbox Default Retention Failed Error: Unable to execute the task, reason: MoveToArchive can only be applied to tags of type default ('All'), Personal or RecoverableItems. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&t=exchgf1&e=ms.exch.err.Ex212177 Exchange Management Shell command attempted: New-RetentionPolicyTag -Name 'Inbox Default Retention' -Type 'Inbox' -Comment '' -AgeLimitForRetention '365.00:00:00' -RetentionAction 'MoveToArchive' -RetentionEnabled $true Elapsed Time: 00:00:00 So how do I archive inbox items? I would basically want a blanket policy that moves everything to the archive folder after 1 year.

So, if I want to ensure that all Emails in the Sent Items Folder are archived after 6 months, how do I do that? FWIW, if you can't apply a 'Move to Archive' Tag to 'Sent Items', then 'Move to Archive' shouldn't be enabled in the combo box for 'Action to Take . . .'; you should only be able to choose one of the Delete options. I don't want to delete all users' Sent Items after (eg) 6 months. I want them Archived so they clear space on Exchange yet allow the user to recover them or search for them years later, if need be. Does this mean that I can't do that: my only option is delete or nothing?Live Long and Prosper

Farscape Fan, Did you ever find an answer to this? I want to do the exact same thing as you - archive just the Inbox or Sent Items. But it is still not clear to me how to do this. I can't create a RPT that does a "move to archive" for these items, so I'm not clear how I could accomplish what seems to be a basic task? Brian