John,

We have no known issues related to Auto-Clean.  We have no active tickets on Auto-Clean.  We have not touched Auto-Clean functionality for years.  You have opened a few tickets since January but nothing related to Auto-Clean.  You give no information about what isn't working.

What was your purpose of posting this?

I have a server with hundreds of domains and thousands of addresses and it does not appear to be running at all. Are you positive it is currently working? It is not exactly something you notice unless you look for it.

For example I have a global policy on the server for the Deleted Items folder of 7 days, and users with email in their Deleted Items dating back to 2020. Now some of that was probably old mail that got recently deleted, But I know for a fact at least one user setup their own overrides 4 days ago, and not a single message has been cleaned up in the last 4 days because they have now asked me twice when it is suppose to happen.

I should also add, when setting up rules for Auto-Clean, you have to select the folder from a drop down. That list is incomplete. Subfolders of folders are missing from the list, so it is impossible to setup rules for those folders. 

I remember that deleted folders with content in the trash will not be affected by the auto cleanup procedure

Thank you Roger. I would probably consider that a bug. However, it is not what we are experiencing. The messages that are not getting cleaned from Deleted Items are not in a folder.

Trash is not excluded from Auto-Clean; it is the primary folder that people use it on.

Again, there are no known issues, and we haven't received a ticket about Auto-Clean in quite some time.

The last ticket we had related to Auto-Clean was our suggestion to use it instead of a content filter, which met the customer's needs and worked as intended.  

If you have a concern, please consider contacting support when you actually see what's going on, rather than just commenting that Auto-Clean is broken and has been broken numerous times... when its never been broken!

We only auto-clean the folder you choose, not its subfolders. If you would like a subfolder to be auto-cleaned, you need to place it in the root. As I mentioned, we don't touch this area often because it can be risky. When we do, we typically implement multiple features at once. The reason subfolders haven't been included previously is to avoid any surprises. If you were expecting only your root to be cleaned, but subfolders were cleaned as well, a user could lose important data.

@Tim Uzzanti wrote:  The reason subfolders haven't been included previously is to avoid any surprises. If you were expecting only your root to be cleaned, but subfolders were cleaned as well, a user could lose important data.

Suggestion for a future build:  Please consider adding an "Include Subfolders" switch, which would behave similarly to, for example, the /S switch in xcopy.
 

Jay,

We don't want to offer recursion simply because someone could really mess things up. We want the inclusion of a folder in Auto-Clean to be a deliberate choice. That said, we do have a task in our backlog to allow users to add any subfolder they want. Now that we have a few features for Auto-Clean, we will likely include this in the upcoming roadmap.  

According to the European Data Protection Regulation, we are not allowed to keep mails more than 6 mths old unless we have been doing business with the client.

It would be very nice to have autoclean include subfolders of the inbox just to avoid the hassle of managing and including what folders and what not folders.

That way a user could keep a folder in the root hierachy which is not meant to be included and the rest is.