E-mail Sweep begins June 30, 2022

Starting June 30, 2022, UM System IT will conduct daily sweeps of the Inbox and Sent Items folders of ALL active university mailboxes for emails older than five years. 

Each day, emails older than five years from your Outlook Inbox and Sent Items folders will be moved to the Deleted folder. Once an email has been swept to the Deleted folder, there is a 30-day window to recover it. If you do not recover an email during those 30 days, it will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

Subfolders that you create within the Inbox or Sent Items folders and other default Outlook folders will not be swept. 

It is not possible for IT to programmatically assist customers with this process. Please choose any - or all - of the suggested email organization options below. 
 

 

 

Prepare for Email Sweep

Three suggested ways to prevent the loss of important emails are available for you to organize and keep important emails from being swept include:

Include instructional content for creating subfolders

Include instructional content for using the AutoArchive tool in Outlook

Include instructional content for usig the Clean Up Conversation tool i Outlook

The importance of Email Sweep

This email clean-up effort is outlined in Email Management Policy 12006 and is essential to ensuring that any sensitive and important data we have in our email remains secure.

It is important to make sure you properly manage your email so that 

  • you comply with UM System's Records Retention Policy and retain the appropriate messages
  • you don't lose messages that are important to performing your job
  • you remove messages that constitute ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial information)

If you are unsure if an email qualifies as a record, refer to the What is a Record?, review the Records Retention Authorizations or contact umrecordsmanagement@umsystem.edu.