Configurations for Exchange Mailbox Agent Exchange Policies

Exchange policies determine:

How messages are archived.
How messages are stubbed and cleaned up.
How messages are deleted from the Exchange server.
How long messages are retained on the MediaAgent.
Whether messages are content indexed.

You can:

For the User Mailbox, assign the same policies to all the mailboxes within a database or Active Directory group.
Assign policies to individual mailboxes or to multiple mailboxes after they have been associated with the subclient.
Change the policies that are assigned to mailboxes after the mailboxes have been associated with the subclient.

When you change an archive, cleanup, or journal policy, the policy is applied the next time the corresponding job runs.

Types of Exchange Policies

The following table describes the Exchange policies.

Policy type	Description
Archiving	This policy determines the archiving and content indexing criteria. The archiving policy defines how the data is protected, but not whether messages are stubbed. Stubbing is defined by the cleanup policy. Important Any changes to the archiving rules could cause the next incremental backup to include all messages like a full backup would do so.
Cleanup	This policy determines whether messages should be stubbed or deleted, and whether messages are removed from the Exchange server after they are stubbed.
Journal	This policy determines what happens to journaled messages after they are archived and if they are content indexed.
Retention	Note This policy determines how long messages remain on the MediaAgent. Important: The Exchange Mailbox Agent uses the retention rules that are defined in the Exchange retention policy. The agent does not use the retention rules that are defined in the storage policy. Therefore, if you have multiple agents in your environment, use a different storage policy for the Exchange Mailbox Agent than the storage policy that you used for the other agents. The Retain messages indefinitely retention rule is applied by default. If you do not assign a retention policy, the Retain messages indefinitely retention rule is assigned automatically and messages are retained indefinitely.

Retention policies must be assigned when mailboxes are associated with the subclient. However, you can assign other types of policies to mailboxes at the time that they are associated with the subclient or later.

Exchange Policies and Mailbox Types

The following table describes which Exchange policies are applicable for each mailbox type.

Mailbox type	Exchange policies
User Mailbox	Archiving Cleanup Retention
Journal Mailbox	Journal Retention
ContentStore Mailbox	Journal Retention

Nested Active Directory Groups

Applies to: User Mailbox

In the case of nested AD groups, policies that are assigned to the parent AD group are inherited by all of the child AD groups up to a maximum of 100 AD groups deep. Any AD groups that are deeper than 100 AD groups must have the policy applied manually. We recommend that you use AD groups that do not have child AD groups, or that have only a few child AD groups.

Policies that are assigned to a child AD group later are inherited by the AD groups below that node. Policies that are assigned to a child AD group take precedence over the policies that were assigned to the parent AD group previously.

Archiving, Cleanup, and Content Indexing Jobs

What is archived, cleaned up, and content indexed depends on what type of mailbox you have configured. Messages in the User Mailbox are archived, cleaned up, and content indexed based on the criteria in the archive and cleanup policies. Messages in the Journal Mailbox and the ContentStore Mailbox are archived, cleaned up, and content indexed based on the criteria in the journal policy.

Retention Policies

The index server is scanned every 24 hours. Messages that are eligible for data aging based on their received time and the criteria defined in the retention policy are pruned from the MediaAgent.

Conflicts Between Retention Policies

Applies to: User Mailbox

A user mailbox's retention policy might be overwritten when another retention policy is associated with the mailbox at the user, database, or Active Directory group level. However, the retention policy will only be overwritten if the newer policy has a longer retention time than the existing policy. When a newer retention policy is associated with a user mailbox, the archive and cleanup policies that correspond to that retention policy are also associated with the user mailbox.

For example:

UserMailbox is a part of DatabaseX, and is a member of ActiveDirectoryGroupY and ActiveDirectoryGroupZ.

DatabaseX is assigned the following Exchange policies:

ArchivePolicy1
CleanUpPolicy1
RetentionPolicy1, retention time = 5 years

ActiveDirectoryGroupY is assigned the following Exchange policies:

ArchivePolicy2
CleanUpPolicy2
RetentionPolicy2, retention time = 7 years

ActiveDirectoryGroupZ is assigned the following Exchange policies:

ArchivePolicy1
CleanUpPolicy2
RetentionPolicy3, retention time = 10 years

In this case, the following Exchange policies are applied to UserMailbox:

ArchivePolicy1
CleanUpPolicy2
RetentionPolicy3, retention time = 10 years