Understanding the Move Date in Messaging Records Management (MRM)

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Exchange 2007's Messaging Records Management (MRM) feature is designed to help your organization manage messages for compliance purposes.  By using Managed Content Settings, users can have their messages moved to different folders or deleted automatically, based on age.  You also have the option to Journal these messages to any SMTP address, which is ideal for many third-party archiving systems.

One thing I've been finding in my cases is that many customers don't understand the Retention Period settings and how they are applied by the Managed Folder Assistant.  Let's take a look at a simple example to try and make this point.  Here is a typical mistake that many people make:

In this example, the Retention Period is set to start When item is moved to the folder.  Most of the time, people decide to choose this option because they want to apply the action to items that were either delivered to the folder or moved to the folder by the user 30 days ago.  When they add these settings to a policy and apply it, they are surprised to find that the items do not get archived.  The policy is actually working correctly in this case, but we need to understand what it is doing.

When you choose "When item is moved to the folder" as the start of the Retention Period, the retention period doesn't actually start until the next time the Managed Folder Assistant runs.  This is explained in the TechNet article regarding how Retention Periods are calculated:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb430780.aspx

What the article does not explain is what the move date is.  The move date is actually a MAPI property named ElcMoveDate.  The "Elc" in ElcMoveDate stands for Exchange Lifecycle Assistant, another name for the Managed Folder Assistant.  This property is viewable by its property number (0x67170102) in MFCMapi:

This property will not be present at all until the Managed Folder Assistant has run on the folder and stamped the item.  The first time the Managed Folder Assistant runs, it stamps every item with the ElcMoveDate property and the current timestamp.  To clarify, this only applies to folders with Managed Content Settings set to  "When item is moved to the folder."   The Managed Folder Assistant will not delete any items at that point, unless there was somehow an existing item with an ElcMoveDate outside the retention period.  In subsequent runs, the Managed Folder Assistant will evaluate each item and determine if its ElcMoveDate is beyond the Retention Period.  If so, the Action specified by the Managed Content Settings for the folder will be taken.

Continuing the example from above, if the "Inbox 30 day retention" settings are applied to a user's mailbox, here is the sequence that would occur:

1.  Managed Folder Assistant runs for the first time on January 1 at 8:00am.  No items in the Inbox currently have an ElcMoveDate stamped, so all are stamped with the current date and time.

2.  Managed Folder Assistant continues to run daily for the next 29 days, moving no items.

3.  Managed Folder Assistant runs on January 31 at 8:00am.  All the items stamped on January 1 are now moved to the Deleted Items folder, because the ElcMoveDate is now 30 days in the past.

The confusion arises because there were very likely items in the Inbox on January 1 that were received or even moved there by the user in November, for example.  The administrator normally expects those items to be moved immediately.  Now you can see why this is not the case.

If you're looking to do archiving based on the date a message was received, you should choose  When delivered, end date for calendar and recurring tasks in the "Retention period starts" box.  When this is chosen, items are processed just as the setting implies:  everything except for Calendar items and recurring Tasks is processed based on message-received date.  Calendar items and recurring Tasks are processed based on the end date of the item.

Typically, the When item is moved to the folder setting is only placed on a folder that you are using as a Destination in your Managed Content Settings.  So, you would normally set the Inbox to start the retention process when items are delivered.  You would then set the Deleted Items folder to process based on when an item is moved to the folder.  This would allow you to have actual 30 day retention on the Inbox and allow, say, another 14 days once the item is moved to Deleted Items before it is permanently deleted.

Here again is a link to the TechNet article mentioned above.  Please review it carefully, as it explains in detail the rest of the retention period process:

How Retention Periods Are Calculated for Items in Managed Folders

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2012
    What is the name of the tool you used to gather the MAPI properties?

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    Alex, I searched around and found a program, MFCMapi , that works well. http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com/ Another question: how does one decipher that date value found in the "ElcMoveDate" field?  

  • Anonymous
    July 16, 2012
    The comment has been removed