How to Disable Retention Policy in Office 365?

Data Retention Policy is used by organizations to manage and protect data and to comply with the industry regulations, legal, and government guidelines. Besides, it also helps manage the data and conserve server storage.

Retention Policy defines how data is stored or processed and how long it will be retained or maintained in the organization. For example, organizations may have a retain-only policy for some data that they want to keep forever or for a specified period, a delete-only policy to delete specific data after a certain period, or retain and delete policy to retain data for some time and then permanently removes it.

In Office 365, retention policies can be applied to multiple locations, such as Exchange email, Microsoft 365 groups, OneDrive accounts, SharePoint, Exchange Public Folders, etc. One can apply the Office 365 retention policy from Microsoft 365 compliance center to specific or multiple locations or user accounts based on the requirements. When a user deletes the content of a mail folder or mailbox included in the retention policy, a copy of the mail item is retained automatically based on the policy.

However, when you disable the retention policy in Office 365 for users or if there’s no other retention policy assigned, the messages or mail items in those user mailboxes may never expire.?

Steps to Disable Retention Policy in Office 365

Below are the steps to disable the retention policy in Office 365 for individual or multiple mailboxes and Outlook users.

Disable Retention Policies via Microsoft 365?

To disable Retention Policy in Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), follow these steps:

• Login to Microsoft 365 as Global Administrator and click All Apps in the left navigation menu.

• ?Click Compliance. This will open a new compliance tab in the web browser.?

• ?In the Microsoft 365 Compliance center, scroll down and click Information governance.

• Your request to disable the selected Retention Policy will be processed.

• After a few seconds, the selected retention policy or policies will be disabled.?

If you want to disable the Retention Policy for a specific user or specific Microsoft 365 locations, such as Exchange email, SharePoint sites, OneDrive, etc., you can do so by editing the particular Retention Policy. The steps are as follows:

• In Microsoft 365 Compliance center, click Information governance and click Retention policies.
• Select the Retention policy you want to disable for specific users or locations and click the Edit (pencil) icon.

• Check name and description and then click Next.
• In the Type section, click Next.
• In the Locations section, you can turn off the Status toggle switch to disable retention policy for a particular location, such as Exchange email.

• ?You may also click the Edit button under the Included or Excluded column to disable the retention policy for specific users. ?

• Click Done and then click Next.
• In the Retention Settings section, you can do any of the following:?

-??Choose the Retain items for a specific period option and then select whether to Delete items automatically or Do nothing.

-?Select Retain items forever to never delete the mail items from a particular location, such as Exchange email.

-?Choose the Only delete items when they reach a certain age option to delete items after a certain period.

• You may keep the default settings and click Next.?

Note: The changes to the Retention Policy will take effect immediately and will delete or retain the mail items forever based on the changes you made.

By default, Microsoft Office 365 retains the mail items for disabled locations and users as long as you don’t delete them, whether accidentally or intentionally.

Disable Retention Policies from Outlook Web App

Office 365 users can also assign or disable (remove) retention policies via the Outlook web app. The steps are as follows:

• Sign in to the Outlook web app using Office 365 credentials.
• To change the retention policy for a particular folder, click Settings (gear icon on top-right) and click View all Outlook settings.

• ?Click on Mail > Retention Policies.
• Select the retention policy from the list you want to disable and click the minus icon (–) to remove and disable the particular retention policy. ?

Disable Retention Policies via Outlook Client?

Like OWA, you can use Outlook client to assign retention policies for a particular mail folder or entire mailbox according to your needs. The steps are as follows:

• Select the folder, click the Assign Policy drop-down and choose Set Folder Policy.

• Click Add or Remove Retention Policies link to remove and disable desired retention policy for the particular folder or entire mailbox. ?

To Wrap Up

Retention Policies are critical for organizations for managing data. Office 365 provides an option to create retention policies and enable or disable them in just a few clicks. Office 365 users can also use their Outlook client or OWA to add or remove retention policies from their mailbox or a particular folder. The changes to retention policies take effect immediately for the user account and may delete items that you don’t want to remove. Thus, be careful while assigning retention policy to a mailbox folder. However, if you lose any mail item and can’t find it after making the changes, you can use Stellar Converter for OST - an OST to PST converter tool to extract mail items from your local Outlook OST data file, including the deleted ones, and then save them to Outlook importable PST format. You may also export the recovered mail items directly to Office 365. The software also helps you convert inaccessible or orphaned Office 365 Outlook OST files into PST format.

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