About Storage Management Policies

Storage Management polices differ from Retention policies in several ways:

• Storage Management policies work independently from retention policies; a user’s mail does not need to be subject to a retention policy in order to be subject to a Storage Management policy.
• Stored email and stubbed attachments are searchable within Email Archival.
• Storage Management policies have a higher priority than retention policies; if a message has been stubbed, it will not be purged, even if it should be purged according to a retention policy.
• Once a message is totally unstubbed, it reverts to the control of applicable retention policies.

Storage Management polices are set through the AMS Admin Console. Before creating Storage Management policies, consider the following:

• A minimum time period must elapse before a message can be stored. The default minimum is 90 days. To change the minimum period, contact Support.
• You can apply Storage Management policies to all users, all administrators, defined mailing lists, servers, or individual users.

• You must have at least one VaultBox installed to implement Storage Management policies. And the VaultBox must have access to the Exchange server.
• You can implement multiple Storage Management policies for each VaultBox, but you can associate only one VaultBox with each Storage Management policy.

If you want the same Storage Management policy in effect across your whole organization, you must create a separate, identical policy for each VaultBox.

• VaultBoxes used to support the Import Manager cannot be used in Storage Management policies.
• If a VaultBox is to be deleted/removed, all that VaultBox’s Storage Management policies must be reassociated with a new VaultBox before the old VaultBox is deleted.
• On a periodic basis, a Harvester on the VaultBox searches the Exchange server for email attachments eligible to be stored. The Harvester coordinates transfer of the message to the data center, and replacement of the attachment with the HTML link by Exchange.
• Note that Harvester cannot open a user’s mailbox if it contains more than 500 folders (this is an Exchange limit). To ensure Harvester can process such mailboxes, users will need to consolidate folders down under the 500 folder limit.
• A stored message will be removed from storage only when:
• It is deleted from the server OR the user has been removed AND
• There is no other retention policy that requires it to be kept.
• Using the command line interface, you can unstub all messages for a user who has been removed from all Storage Management policies. See Return Stubbed Files to User’s Mailbox
• If multiple users’ mailboxes contain the same email message, only one copy of the message will be stored by Storage Management.
• Ensure end users know to unstub messages before they use the Outlook® storage function to archive messages. If messages are not unstubbed, the messages will only retain the stubs, not the attachments themselves.

Also, if messages are archived in Outlook, Email Archival assumes the message has been deleted will not retain the attachment unless the email is subject to a retention policy.

• The following message classes are eligible for storage management: IPM.Note and IPM.Note.MessageOneStubbed. Within these classes, the following attachment types are not eligible for storage management:
• OLE attachments
• Attachments made by reference (such as through the SharePoint® system)
• Calendar items
• Contacts
• Embedded messages
• For Storage Management purposes, inline attachments are defined as messages whose Content-Type field is multipart/related, when viewing the SMTP source of a message. These are often HTML images embedded in an HTML-formatted email.
• Windows Rights Management messages are not supported for Storage Management, because stubbing the encrypted attachment portion of the message makes the message unusable in Outlook and in Email Archival.

From an end user’s perspective, the storage management feature works slightly differently depending whether email is accessed through Outlook® (users click on the stub’s link to access the stored attachment) or the Outlook Extension (users’ stored attachments appear the same as unstored attachments).