Retention policy doesn't work on the In-Place Archive mailbox in Exchange Server

View products that this article applies to.

Symptoms

Consider the following scenario:

In an Exchange Server environment, the default retention policy is applied on the In-Place Archive mailbox.
The deletion tag is applied on the Deleted Items folder.

If a user deletes a folder in the Archive mailbox in this scenario and then restores the folder back from the Deleted Items folder, the deletion tag continues to apply to the recovered folder. This causes the folder to be deleted again.

Note This issue only occurs in the In-Place Archive mailbox.

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Cause

This issue occurs because, when Exchange Server checks whether an existing tag is present and in the Archive folder, the folder is set to explicitly not change.

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Resolution

For Exchange Server 2013

To resolve this issue, install Cumulative Update 13 for Exchange Server 2013 or a later cumulative update for Exchange Server 2013.

For Exchange Server 2016

To resolve this issue, install Cumulative Update 2 for Exchange Server 2016 or a later cumulative update for Exchange Server 2016.

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Workaround

To work around this issue, right-click the folder in Outlook, click Properties, click the Policy tab, and then choose Use Parent Folder Policy.

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Status

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

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References

For more information, see the Retention tags and retention policies topic on TechNet.

Learn about the terminology that Microsoft uses to describe software updates.

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