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How to automatically remove older emails from Exchange and Outlook

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WARNING!  The following products were discontinued on 30 June 2021 and are no longer available for purchase or supported:

- Exclaimer Auto Responder

- Exclaimer Email Alias Manager for Exchange  

- Exclaimer Mail Archiver

For more information, please see the Discontinued Questions and Answers page.

In this guide, we’ll explain how to automatically remove older emails from your mailbox, using Exchange and In Outlook features. 

For all organizations already using archiving, this can be an efficient, hands-free way to cut down on the total number of items in Exchange and the disk space their email occupies, which enhances performance and stability.

In Outlook

This section describes how to set up an auto-archiving policy that deletes older emails automatically in Outlook.
Note: You’ll need to repeat this process for each folder you want to clean automatically.
  1. In Outlook, right-click on the folder and select Properties.
    For example purposes, the below screenshot displays the Inbox folder selected.

    mceclip0.png

  2. Select the AutoArchive tab and select Archive this folder using this settings.

  3. In Clean out items older than, enter 180 days, or whatever the desired amount of days/months/years may be.

    mceclip1.png

  4. Select the Permanently delete old items option.

  5. Click OK to save the changes and close the window.

In Exchange

Caution: The following steps apply to Exchange Server 2013 and onwards.

This section describes how to set up an auto-archiving policy that deletes older emails automatically in Exchange.

Note: For more information, see Microsoft’s article: Apply a retention policy to mailboxes.
  1. Go to the Exchange admin center.

  2. From the left-hand side tree, select recipients, then select mailboxes. 



  3. Double-click the mailbox you want to add the retention policy to.

    The Edit User Mailbox window is displayed.
    Note: You will need to repeat this process for each folder you want to clean automatically.
  4. Select mailbox features.

  5. From the Retention policy drop-down list, select the retention policy you want to apply to this mailbox.
    For more information, see how you can create a new or edit an existing retention policy. 



  6. Click Save to save the changes made.

To create a new retention policy or edit an existing retention policy

  1. Go to the Exchange admin center.

  2. From the left-hand side tree, select compliance management, then select retention policies. 



  3. As required, click on (Add) to create a new retention policy or (Edit) to edit the selected retention policy.

    The retention policy window is displayed. 


    - In Name, enter a name for your retention policy. 

    - Click (Add) to associate the appropriate Retention Policy Tags with it.

    As required, select the number of days an email can be held for. For example, if you set this to 365 days then any emails more than 365 days old will be deleted.

    - Click Save to save the changes made.

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