Email retention is a feature that provides a tamper-proof copy of every email sent or received, which can be accessed only by administrators of the account. It is a feature that can help to meet the compliance requirements for industries or businesses that are required to keep records of all their email communication.
This feature is only available for customers subscribed to our Professional plan or legacy business accounts. (Note: If you signed up on or after April 8, 2024, this feature is only available on the Business Professional plan.)
- About email retention
- How to enable retention
- How to view retained emails
- How to download the retention archive
- How to disable retetention
- Retention for legacy business users
About email retention
Email retention is flexible enough to meet the demands of most industries:
- The retention archive can be enabled or disabled per account.
- Email is kept in special read-only folders that cannot be altered by any user, but can be viewed by an administrator.
- Enabling or disabling retention also generates an email, so you can confirm that retention has not been tampered with.
- Flexible retention policies are available, so you can decide how long to keep emails based on your business/industry requirements.
- Professional accounts have no charge for enabling retention.
- Legacy business accounts are charged based on the storage you use: $2.00 USD per account, per GB, per month (see below for more details).
How to enable retention
To enable email retention in your Professional account:
- Log in as an admin user.
- Go to the Settings → Users & Sharing screen.
- Select the users you want to enable retention for and click Edit in the toolbar at the top.
- Enable the Keep a tamper-proof copy of all email sent to/from this user option and select how long you wish to hold the copy.
Note that enabling the archive only applies to new emails sent and received from that moment on. Emails sent and received prior to enabling email retention will not be archived.
How to view retained emails
Only administrators of the account can view retained emails.
- Go to the Settings → Users & Sharing screen.
- Click the Retention & Access tab.
- Click View email retention archive.
In the folder list, you will see a folder for each user that has retention enabled. In the user's main folder are messages showing when archiving has been enabled or disabled. Included within the user's folder are sub-folders showing their logins, received mail, and sent email.
How to download the retention archive
To download the email retention archive:
- While viewing the retention archive, go to Settings → Migration → Export.
- Click New mail export. From the dropdown menu labeled Folder, select the retention archive folder that you wish to download.
- Click Save. This will return you to the Export mail page, where you can see the zip file preparing for download.
- Once the zip file is ready, click Download.
How to disable retention
To disable email retention:
- Log in as an admin user.
- Go to the Settings → Users & Sharing screen.
- Select the users you want to disable retention for and click Edit in the toolbar at the top.
- Disable the Keep a tamper-proof copy of all email sent to/from this user option.
Note that enabling the archive only applies to new emails sent and received from that moment on. Emails sent and received prior to enabling email retention will not be archived.
After retention has been disabled, account admins can continue to access the existing archived data for the previously defined retention period.
Retention for legacy business users
Note: Accounts with users on the Professional or Business Professional plan are not charged for email retention.
For accounts on our legacy Business plan, our pricing for email retention is based on the total size of email retained for a user.
The price is calculated and charged on the 1st calendar day of each month. For each user archive, $2.00 is charged for each gigabyte in the user's retention account. Prices are rounded up to the nearest gigabyte, so if you have 1.7 GB in one user's archive, you would be charged $4.00 for that user's archive (rounded up to 2 GB).
To check the amount of storage used, view the account archive at Settings → Users & Sharing → Retention & Access.
Note: If the retention archive is disabled, Legacy accounts will continue to be billed $2.00 per gigabyte per user for as long as the archive exists. To stop getting billed for retention, the archive must be completely deleted. Please contact our support team for assistance with deleting an archive.
If you would like to continue with archive retention, but no longer want the unexpected costs, we invite you to upgrade to our Professional plan. For $90 per user per year, Professional subscribers receive 100 GB of mail storage and 50 GB of file storage, plus your retention archive at no additional cost.
To switch your subscription to the Professional plan, go to Settings → Billing & Plan and click the Choose a new plan button. Click Select Professional.