We have told you before why you should not use the Outlook Deleted Items folder as your filing cabinet i.e. do not use the Deleted Items folder as the folder where you keep emails for later reference.
Here’s another good reason…. If you are using Office 365 (I recently moved my email account to it), your Deleted Items folder is automatically cleared (every day) of emails that are 30 days or older.
The reason for this is that folders in Outlook that are linked to Office 365 have Retention Policies applied to them.
A retention policy defined how long Office 365 will keep items in users’ mailboxes and defines what actions to take on items that have reached a certain age.
The default action for the Deleted Items is to clear items that are 30 days or older.
While it is possible to change this default action, I don’t think you should. Automatically clearing emails provides two benefits:
- It discourages you from “filing” emails in the Deleted Items folder.
- It provides insurance in case you need to recover an email that you deleted recently.
You can find more information on Setting Email Retention Policies in Office 365 here.
