1

We don’t have litigation hold and have changed the deleted item retention time to 28 days through powershell. While this helps I need better retention I’m considering whether I need litigation hold or not.

I am wondering how far back eDiscovery can allow me to export to .PST previous emails.

I can’t get a straight answer to this anywhere …

6 Spice ups
2

Unless I misunderstand, ediscovery can find any emails that are in the mailbox database. Thus if you have deleted it, you’re not going to find it.

Litigation hold prefents the mails from being actually deleted - which may be what you want.

Alternatively, consider transport rules to copy mail to/from individuals. See: https://www.oxfordsbsguy.com/2013/03/09/how-to-copy-incoming-or-outgoing-emails-to-another-mailbox-in-exchange-2007-or-2010/ for details on this.;

3

I recently recovered emails that were 3 years old using eDiscovery, and there wasn’t a litigation hold on this user’s mailbox. I’m not sure how far back it goes exactly.

4

It depends on your mailbox policy. On whatever your deleted items recovery policy and time is set to. It can search back as far as the policy allows without litigation hold.

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5

If using a version of O365 with Exchange Plan 2 then you still need to have set data retention policy otherwise 30 days is the most it would go back. See here: Learn about retention policies & labels to retain or delete | Microsoft Learn

If you use Plan 1 such as the Office 365 business plans or exchange plan 1 standalone then you would need a third party solution to retain it longer.