Mail purge safeguard

[jgedeon]

Does anyone know where or how one could get around the 30 day safeguard that is set in Zimbra so that messages/mail can be automatically purged less days?

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by jgedeon

Does anyone know where or how one could get around the 30 day safeguard that is set in Zimbra so that messages/mail can be automatically purged less days?

Why would you need to do that?

[jgedeon]

Doesn't everyone want a 7 day document retention policy? The email that is received by this system is only needed for a very short amount of time. The volume of mail received into the system is also very large and we don't want to store what we don't need.

[gnyce]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the retention polity is not on the length of being in the Trash, but on the date of the message in question. I faced this when a user accidentally dragged a whole series of folders into the Trash, and the next day, most were not there to be recovered (had to restore from backup).

[jgedeon]

The point is, I/we don't want to keep any email on this server for over a week. Zimbra has put in this little "safeguard" that we wish not to use. I am just looking for help on how to either remove this safeguard or edit it to a shorter period.

[bdial]

this can be edited in the admin interface under the cos configuration. go to the advanced tab and scroll down to the bottom for email retention policy

[mmorse]

I think jgedeon's referring to main/ZimbraServer/src/java/com/zimbra/cs/mailbox/Mailbox.java:

int globalTimeout = (int) (acct.getTimeInterval(Provisioning.A_zimbraMailMes sageLifetime, 0) / 1000);

// sanity-check the really dangerous value...
if (globalTimeout > 0 && globalTimeout < Constants.SECONDS_PER_MONTH) {
// this min is also used by POP3 EXPIRE command. update Pop3Handler.MIN_EPXIRE_DAYS if it changes.
ZimbraLog.purge.warn("global message timeout < 1 month; defaulting to 31 days");
globalTimeout = Constants.SECONDS_PER_MONTH;
}

Since zimbraMailMessageLifetime affects items in any folder we hard-coded a minimum; just too many support tickets on 'all my mail is missing'...

(If your getting that much email every 7 days, are you just using it for status checks? If so it may be time to consider a monitoring/stats package instead.)

However you can still do things like:
-Cron a periodic zmmailbox emptyFolder command (which is recursive by default, and yes you can run it on Inbox from CLI/SOAP, we just prevent it on system folders in ZWC).
-Move to trash with a filter (if your not already sorting for other reasons).

Gnyce's correct, we currently purge by date received (not by how long it's been in trash) however you can change this in the upcoming 5.0.17 by setting zimbraMailPurgeUseChangeDateForTrash TRUE (19702)

Mailbox Purge - Zimbra :: Wiki