Retention Policy

[Sachin Acharya]

Hi,

In Retention Policy, by default the retention period is 7 years and 2 days, and after the retention period is over, the piler utility removes(deletes) the messages from the archive. If that is so, I found some places where it is mentioned that the messages will stay in the archive till eternity. What will happen if I set the retention period to 90 days? Will the piler utility delete the mails after 90 days?

[Janos SUTO]

By default nothing is removed from the archive, even if its an aged message (ie. its retention is expired). You have to run pilerpurge if you want to get rid of aged messages. So if you set the retention time to 90 days, and you run pilerpurge, then all >90 days messages will be gone.

[Sachin Acharya]

Ok thanks,

But is there a way by with I can store the aged mails in another drive?

Pilerexport is one, but any automated way to the same? Or I will have to run Pilerexport once every 90 days.

[Janos SUTO]

I don't follow. What are you trying to achieve?

[Sachin Acharya]

I meant to say that we archive all the mails, but after every 3 months, we store the archived mails in an external disk. Thus the mails are retained in the piler for only 3 months after which they are stored in an external disk.

So I wish to know what the Retention Policy actually means if all the mails are retained even after the retention policy date is over.

[Janos SUTO]

The retention policy assigns an expiry date to each received emails. However you have to run the pilrpurge utility to actually remove them. If you don't run it, then messages won't be removed even if they are already aged.

So to accomplish what you described, I recommend you to run pilerexport every day to export the previous days emails, eg. pilerexport -a 2014.06.09 -b 2014.06.09

[Sachin Acharya]

Thanks, that helped a lot.

Just one last thing. The Periodic Purge is enabled. Does that mean that after expiration of the mails, they will be purged?

[Janos SUTO]

Yes, if you have a crontab entry for pilerpurge. It doesn't exist by default.

[Sachin Acharya]

Thanks a lot! :)