Managing Compliance in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Putting a mailbox on retention hold

When you put a mailbox on retention hold, you tell Exchange to suspend the processing of any retention policies that apply to the mailbox. For example, if a user is away for an extended period and will not be able to process the items in his mailbox, you could put his mailbox on retention hold to prevent Exchange moving from items to his archive mailbox. You can set retention hold on a mailbox through EMC or EMS. To do this with EMC, select the mailbox and view its properties. Click the Mailbox Settings tab and select the Messaging Records Management option. You can then select the start and end date for the retention hold period (Figure 15-19). Setting any hold on a mailbox—retention or litigation—could take up to 60 minutes to become effective because the hold is respected after Exchange refreshes the cache that it uses to hold account information.

The equivalent command to set retention hold on a mailbox as executed through EMS is shown next. You’ll see that we have also added a retention comment in this command. The retention comment does not appear in versions of Outlook before Outlook 2010 as there is no user interface exposed for this purpose. Outlook Web App does not display the retention comment either, for the same reason. The retention comment will appear in Outlook after the MFA next runs and processes the mailbox.

Set-Mailbox -Identity 'Andrews, Lisa (Sales)' -RetentionHoldEnabled $True
-StartDateForRetentionHold '7/20/2010 8:00:00 AM' -EndDateForRetentionHold
'8/11/2010 8:00:00 AM'
-RetentionComment 'This mailbox is on retention hold while the user is on vacation
between July 20 and August 11, 2010'

Figure 15-19 Setting retention hold through EMC.

To remove the retention hold and restore the normal processing of retention policies, set the property to $False:

Set-Mailbox -Identity 'Andrews, Lisa (Sales)' -RetentionHoldEnabled $False
-RetentionComment $Null