Yes, a retention policy for archived emails would be great to have.

What happens if we just delete, say, all files and folders for an archiving domain prior to some arbitrary date?

I believe this would prevent you downloading or restoring those results, but they may still show up in the message archive search as they would be indexed already. I can test this scenario and let you know what I see!

Good morning Matthew, and thanks for your patience on this as I was out of the office late last week and then we had the weekend. I was able to complete further testing on the archival indexes as I noted previously. First, I enabled archiving and sent several test messages on the 8th. Then today I sent a couple more test messages, leaving me with an archive including the 8th and the 15th. 

To test this I stopped the SmarterMail system service and deleted:

- Current\2021-06-08 folder (to delete all archive messages from the 8th)

- archiveindex_2021_06_08.dat file

I then started the system service back up and did a general search of the archive and found ONLY the mail from the 15th with no signs of mail from the 8th. So, as long as you purge the DAT and folder itself I think you should be able to clean up this archive successfully. Please be sure to get a full backup of the folder before making any changes, and be sure to stop the system service before rolling that out. Have a good one Matthew!

Hi Kyle!

Stop SmarterMail service?! What's that??!

I try to do that only a few times a year!  ;)

Hey Matthew! Makes complete sense to me, so try to plan these changes around expected downtime windows for sure! As long as you have a backup of the archive from before your changes, there should be nothing you can't recover from. Have a good one!

Hi, I did some tests and even without stopping the services by deleting both the relative folders and the relative index .dat however it works equally. Deleted messages do not appear in the search.

However, I will never tire of proposing substantial changes to the filing system. In smarteremail it is perhaps the function that needs the most revision. Here are some details

https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a94178/more-on-message-archiving.aspx

Also, Message archiving needs granular permissions so a domain admin account can be granted or denied access to the archive. I know, this is off-topic…

Sorry for the delay on this follow-up Matthew. I just wanted to note that Domain Administrators can search the message archive so long as you have a Message Archiving rule set up specific to that domain (archiving all domains won't suffice.) Once you have a rule set up for that domain, the domain administrator can search the archive within Domain Settings>Message Archive Search as you'll see here: