Vault retention question (primarily gmail)

[alexgrutza]

This may be obvious but it's early here and the 7mo old had a bad night 😕 

Vault can be configured to retain all users data (primarily gmail) indefinitely (as is configured), but I want to know if we can also have Vault/Gmail remove emails from users inboxes/labels/etc that are say over 5 years old.

• An example would be:
• Users has 100GB of email going back 15 years
• Vault is configured to retain all email indefinitely (we want to keep this)
• We want to remove from the user, emails that are older than 5yr to shrink gmail storage usage

I feel like this is possible but any guidance would be appreciated. Our Vault rules were set up before I got here and there's a lot of rules that don't seem to do anything but I'm afraid to remove them in case it deletes emails unintentionally 

[Ivan]

Gam can do this.

https://sites.google.com/jis.edu.bn/gam-commands/services/gmail#h.p_n8qDpyf8Y9-u

The command would be something like: 
gam user username@domain.com delete messages query "before:2019-06-07" max_to_delete 1000000 doit

Not sure if max_to_delete is optional or not (I think if you omit it, it'll just do the first one)?

If that works you could run a script that would go through each of your users.

[SteveHarmon]

I might add the attachments option as well, since those are usually the culprit for large email sizes.

[slvandewalle_gb]

I believe that this is possible with a retention rule, however, I have never used such a rule.

See the section with the title "Example custom rule: Purge messages after 365 days" on the below support page.

https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2535539?hl=en#zippy=%2Cexample-custom-rule-purge-messages-af...

[bethhughes]

Make sure your Vault retention rules match that of your school policy for records retention for student and staff Google files. As will be noted in the Google support documents, as soon as you change the retention dates from indefinitely to something less, it will immediately delete files from the user accounts and there is no turning back. (that upsets my stomach just typing it) You might want to notify endusers of the change in retention policy so you are not receiving support tickets when all their "valuable stuff" is missing.

Hope you and your 7 month old have a good night's sleep tonight. 

[alexgrutza]

Thank you, teething doesn't let anyone sleep! Haha.

We're a nonprofit higher ed so our retention is different than public sector edu. I will say that we want to retain everything in Vault indefinitely, but anything in the users inbox that they access we only want to limit to x-years old. 

I'm thinking GAM or the Admin Dashboard setting is where we'd make changes (apps\gmail\compliance\email and chat auto deletion)