Move to Archive action doesn’t work with Retention Policy Tag (RPT) Tag

When you enable a retention tag, you must specify a retention age for the tag. This age indicates the number of days to retain a message after it arrives in the user's mailbox.

When creating or configuring an RPT, you can select one of the following actions such as 'Delete and Allow recovery', 'Permanently delete', 'Mark as Past Retention Limit' and 'Move to Archive' to specify what retention action should be taken when a mailbox item reaches its retention age:

Move to Archive This action moves a message to the user's archive mailbox. Tags that have this action applied are known as archive tags. Messages are moved to a folder in the archive mailbox that has the same name as the source folder in the user's primary mailbox. This allows users to easily locate messages in their archive mailbox. The Move to Archive action is available only for DPTs and personal tags. You can't create an RPT with the Move to Archive action. If the mailbox user doesn't have an archive mailbox, no action is taken.

RPT tag only works with 'Delete and Allow recovery' & 'Permanently delete' unless we are creating RPT for 'Recoverable Items' folder. 'Recoverable Items' is a hidden folder in the Non-IPM sub-tree. It contains the Deletions, Versions, Purges, and Audits sub-folders. Retention tags for this folder move items from the Recoverable Items folder in the user's primary mailbox to the Recoverable Items folder in the user's archive mailbox. You can assign only the Move To Archive retention action to tags for this folder.

If we try to create a Retention Policy tag with folder type ‘Inbox’ or any other default folders with ‘Move To Archive’ action. It won’t work and it is expected to fail.

But once the RPT is created with any other action like ‘Delete and Allow Recovery” or “Permanently delete”, then we can later modify the retention action with ‘Move to Archive’ action as mentioned in the below screenshots.

Though we could be able to set the ‘Move to Archive’ action on created RPT tag, but it won’t work since ‘move to archive’ action with RPT tag is not recommended, such misconfiguration of RPT tag may lead to other issues like archive database growth and archive mailbox dumpster bloating issues.

- Anil