Messaging Records Management in Exchange Server 2013

To meet the legal or the business requirement or to comply with the regulations, organizations should have an emails life cycle policies as part of their Messaging Policy. Messaging Record Management feature help the organizations to decide and plan on, how long and where the email messages to be retained and do they need to retain all the emails for same period etc.

Important Terms related to MRM in Exchange 2013


Retention Policy


It is the logical grouping of Retention Tags. When applying a retention policy to a mailbox, the retention tags that are linked with it are directly applied to the mailbox.

Retention Tag


Retention tags are the retention settings that will be applied on messages and folders on the user mailbox. There are 3 types on Retention Tags are available

Default Policy Tag: This retention setting will be applied to all the email items on the mailbox that are not applied with any other retention tags

Retention Policy Tag: Retentions settings that are applied on default folders

Personal Tag: This will be applied in Outlook Web Access and Outlook 2010 and later client to the custom folders and individual emails items on mailbox

Managed Folder Assistant


Managed Folder Assistant is a process that runs on Mailbox Server, which process all the mailbox and it will apply the retention policy settings based on the retention tags link to it. It is responsible for archiving, message expiration and compliance.

How to Implement Messaging Records Management feature


Messaging Records Management feature is implemented using Retention tags and Retention Polices in Exchange 2013. Below shows the details on how to implement Message Records Management

Step 1: Create a Retention Tag


Three types of Retention Tags can be created and the below command creates a new Default Policy Tag

New-RetentionPolicyTag -Name "DPT-1Year-Delete" -Type All -AgeLimitForRetention 365 -RetentionAction DeleteAndAllowRecovery

Step 2: Create a Retention Policy


New-RetentionPolicy "Chennai-Users-RP"

Step 3: Link Retention Tag to Retention Policy


We can link one Default Policy tag to delete emails, one Default Policy Tag to archive emails and one Default Policy Tag to deleted voice mail message, one Retention Policy Tag for default folders and number of Personal Tags

Note: If we already created the Retention Tags that are to be linked to the Retention Policy, then we can directly link the Retention Tags during the Retention Policy creation using the below shell command

New-RetentionPolicy "Chennai-Users-RP" -RetentionPolicyTagLinks " DPT-1Year-Delete ", "DPT-1Year-Archive", "DPT-Chenai-VM","RPT","Personal Tag Name"

Step 4: Apply Retention Policy to users Mailbox


Only one Retention Policy can be assigned to a mailbox, where that retention policy can hold different retention tags. To apply the Retention Policy to user mailbox

Set-Mailbox –Identity Rajkumar –RetentionPolicy "Chennai-Users-RP"

And to force the retention policy to apply to user mailbox

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant –Identity Rajkumar@chennai.com

Retention Hold


Retention hold is a Messaging Records Management feature which will help administrator to hold the emails for certain period of time, for example when user is on vacation etc. If a Retention Hold is enabled on the Mailbox, then the Retention Policy will not take effect.

To enable Retention Hold

Set-Mailbox –Identity Rajkumar –RetentionHoldenabled $True

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