Meet Email-Retention Needs with Exchange 2007

Select the properties sheet's Mailbox Settings tab, then select the Messaging Records Management option and click the Properties button. You should now see the Messaging Records Management dialog box that Figure 4 shows.

Select the Managed folder mailbox policy check box, then click Browse. You should see the policy created in the last step (we called it Managed Folders). Select this policy and click OK three times to close all open dialog boxes. The policy is now associated with the user account and should be active at this point.

Now that you've created a mailbox to act as a message repository, the next step is to move Contoso messages into the mailbox. The easiest way to accomplish this is to create a transport rule. Transport rules look at messages as they flow through the Exchange organization.

To create a transport rule, navigate through the console tree to Organization Configuration Hub Transport. Next, click the New Transport Rule link in the Actions pane to launch the New Transport Rule wizard.

The wizard's initial screen asks you to enter a name for the rule as well as an optional comment. Let's name the rule Contoso, and we'll add a comment indicating that the rule copies Contoso-related messages to a repository mailbox.

Click Next, and you'll see a screen asking you to select a condition for the rule to look for. There are many conditions that you can specify, but let's assume that a message will be considered to be related to the Contoso account if the word Contoso appears anywhere in the message subjector body. Therefore, select the when theSubject field or the body of the message contains specific words check box, as Figure 5, shows.

Notice in Figure 5 that specific words is underlined in the edit section in the bottom pane. Click the specific words link to enter the words you want the rule to apply to. In this case, just enter Contoso.

Click Next, and you'll be prompted to select an action for the rule. In this case, choose the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) the Message to Address option. Doing so will cause a copy of every message containing the word Contoso to be sent to the repository mailbox. Just as you clicked the specific words link earlier, you must now click the Address link to enter the email address that's associated with your repository mailbox.

To complete the process, click Next twice, followed by New and Finish. The new transport rule is now created.

Create an Outlook Rule
We're almost done except for one minor detail. The Inbox associated with the repository mailbox that we created doesn't have a message-retention policy associated with it. We need to guarantee that Contoso-related messages are retained for five years. We've created a managed custom folder that has a five-year retention period associated with it, though, so we just need to move messages from the Inbox folder to our managed custom folder.

Unfortunately, you can't do so through Exchange Management Console, but you can get the job done through Outlook by creating an Outlook rule. The procedure I'll describe is designed for use with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

Open the repository mailbox in Outlook, then choose Rules and Alerts from Outlook's Tools menu. When the Rules and Alerts dialog box appears, click the New Rule button. Outlook displays various rule templates. Click the Check Messages When they Arrive option found in the Start from a Blank Rule section, then click Next.

You'll see a screen displaying various rule conditions. Select the Where my name is not in the To box check box. Remember that our transport rule sends messages to this mailbox by using a BCC, so the mailbox owner's name should never appear in the To box.

Click Next, then select the Move it to the Specified Folder check box. Click Specified, and you'll see a list of folders. Select the folder to which the retention policy applies, then click Finish, followed by OK.

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