At DES, emails are retained indefinitely until an employee leaves the agency, unless an employee applies retention to them. This is done through the applying Retention Labels (also sometimes referred to as policies) to individual emails or to folders within the Inbox.
Important things to know about email Retention Labels:
- You will not be able to change the retention for the following folders:
- Inbox
- Sent Items
- Archive
- Drafts
- Calendar
- Deleted Items
- Outbox
- Contacts
- If you do not set a retention label on your email or email folders, your email will be retained indefinitely until you delete it or leave the agency (it will, however, move to the Online Archive after 6 months).
- After you leave, your supervisor will have 30 days to review your email account, move any emails your program may need access to, and ensure that retention is applied. After the 30 days, emails without retention will be deleted and supervisors and other staff will no longer have access to any emails in the account. Off-boarding Employees: Records Management – Washington State DES
- You may apply retention to a specific email or by moving it to a folder with a specified retention. You may set retention on:
- An individual email or group of emails
- A folder: Folders and sub-folders will default to the "parent" retention. You can change the retention for a folder or sub-folder in order to have it act independently of the parent.
- Below are some different ways to delete emails you do not wish to retain:
- If the email has already been assigned a retention policy, the only way to completely delete the item is to assign the email to a shorter retention period. You can reassign the email to the 0001-Day-Delete-Labeled Date label. This will automatically delete the email in one day.
- If the email has already been assigned a retention policy, the only way to completely delete the item is to assign the email to a shorter retention period. You can reassign the email to the 0001-Day-Delete-Labeled Date label. This will automatically delete the email in one day.
Deleted Items Folder:
- If you empty the Deleted Items folder, all of the emails will be permanently deleted regardless of retention policy.
- Unless the Deleted Items folder is emptied, emails will stay in the folder for the retention period assigned to the email.
Records retention schedules can be found here: Records Retention Schedules
For questions or clarification, contact the Agency Records Officer (Rachel Thompson).
For more information about Retention Labels and how they work, see: What are Retention Labels? – Washington State DES