Currently the "Auto-archive after" feature requires knowing or guessing what the server's message retention policy is, and setting a number of days that is "close to, but less than" the server's own retention policy.
Because if you set a "number of days" that is too long, the server's own retention policy will drop the messages before they are ever moved into your archive. But if you set a "number of days" that is short enough to guarantee the server's retention policy isn't an issue, now you have to switch to "Archive" view to ever search these messages, even though they could have remained online.
It seems both problems could be solved if "Auto-Archive" had a "continuous" option, rather than having a "number of days" configuration. And when continuous mode was "on", every new message is put into the archive immediately, even though it is also still in the online mailbox too. If I explicitly delete the message, then it will be removed from both the online mailbox and the archive.
But when the message ends up left alone for XX days, if XX days is the post office's own retention limit, the online post office drops the message. Which doesn't matter to my local Archive, nor had to be "guessed" or "predicted" by my local archive settings, because the message has been in my local Archive since day 1.
There is no longer the possibility of a "hole" between "what is my server's retention policy" and "what is my auto-archive setting", because everything goes into the archive as soon as the mail client has seen it.
In addition, now switching to the "Archive" view allows you to search "everything" (whether only available from the archive, or also still online) because "everything" is always in the archive.
The existing behavior of "only auto-archive after XX days" can remain available, for those who specifically need or want that. But there should be an "immediate" or "continuous" option, where the local archive always has "everything". And the online mailbox gets purged at whatever the configured server-side retention limit is, yet the local archive always has "everything" regardless of what that server-side retention period might have been.
by: Alan A. | over a year ago | Windows Client
Comments
I know, off topic. But seriously, you shouldn't be using archiving (this way) these days. In fact, personally I'd love to see the current local archiving go away from groupwise entirely. It serves no more purpose.
In your example, no matter how you set it, there is always a chance to lose data in your setup, if only if someone is offline longer than your "retention" time in the PO (sick, long vacation, you name it).
Thanks for the input Massimo, and agreed that if the mail client is offline for longer than the post office's retention period, local archive is missing data.
Perhaps explain more about "it serves no purpose." Since at least in my environment, messages /do/ disappear after the XX retention days set on the post office, and without the local Archive, I wouldn't have them. i.e. What is it that you're saying I, or the administrator of my post office, should have been doing instead, for me to have access to messages I chose to keep, back to 2002 like I currently have in my local archive.
There is literally almost no serious business case to use archiving and force mail deletion in the groupwise mailboxes. So yes, your admin should allow you to keep messages in a sensible way right inside your groupwise mailbox as long as you want. There exists hardly any valid reason not to.
Local client archiving is either an administrative nightmare, or a recipe for data loss, which with upcoming legislation also easily becomes a legal problem.