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Auto-Clean ONLY Attachments
Idea shared by Jay Dubb - 4/22/2023 at 5:42 AM
Proposed
We have customers in business types that receive a HUGE number of attachments-- healthcare, real estate, etc.  99% of these attachments are saved and uploaded to a portal (EMR, CRM, etc.) meaning there is no need to retain in email.  But, the email body itself needs to be kept.  

The attachments waste huge amounts of space.  One of our clients estimates at least 3 TB of their consumption is old attachments that were already processed.

PROBLEM:  Auto-clean has NO option to delete only attachments while retaining the body of the email.

SUGGESTION:  Add an auto-clean option to delete just ATTACHMENTS that meet criteria.  Example:  "Delete Attachments in [Inbox, Sent, Deleted] for messages [older than XX days]."

This will allow the client's IT department to make better use of their disk quota, while allowing users to keep all the email bodies, without the unneeded attachments.

**Please UP-VOTE this post if you agree.
 

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Bumping this thread to see if anyone else has this need.  The point is to auto-clean attachments over a certain age, to save disk space, while leaving the message (text) intact.

Please UP-VOTE if you agree.
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It would be awesome to have this!

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I don't agree with this.
I think removing the attachments but keeping the email is a dangerous and wrong way to clean up.
What would you answer to a customer who asks you why their attachments are no longer accessible?
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)
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It would be an aggreement with the customer and since its allready in another system, then it just takes up space.
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Kind of messy! 
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The feature has been requested by more than one customer.  Our customers are in document-heavy industries, where the attachments are downloaded and put into a CRM or other portal and no longer needed.  They want to keep the (small KB) text portion of the messages intact for reference, but any attachments referred to in the message can quickly be viewed in whatever document management system they're using.  

Examples?  Real estate/closing documents, offers, property management, etc.  Healthcare related (encrypted emails).  Sales/orders.  

This would NEVER be forced on customers.  Only those who want to use can do so.  Domain defaults block auto-clean rules (it's opt-in) and domain admins can override.

Cleaning out attachments while leaving the text/body of the message, isn't as unusual as you might think.  In fact, with one of our Exchange Server customers, they require their users to delete attachments as soon as they're saved to their document management system.  Surprisingly, their users are reasonably obedient and mailbox size is kept well under control.
 

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