Maybe your email archiving and retention project is far off down the road, so in the interim period now might be a good time to organize email folders on your Exchange 2007 server. While you’re waiting or planning an archiving strategy, you can leverage the new features of Exchange Server 2007. The “managed folders” feature allows setting email limitations and retention rules. How about being able to prevent email users from storing messages in their Inbox longer than a specified time period? This feature can also be used to make sure messages in other locations are retained for a certain period of time.

Other options with Exchange 2007 server allow for controlling how messages related to a particular topic are retained for a specific amount of time. You will need to combine managed folder capabilities with other Exchange 2007 email tools, such as transport rules, quota limits, and defining public folders to create an automated retention process.  You can also set email archiving rules.

Before automating email storage quota limits and retention periods on Exchange 2007 mailboxes and folders, we must set up managed folders. As an example, the first step is to use, let’s say “Project XYZ” as an example to create a manage folder.  This allows email users to store messages related to that specific project in a particular folder where the messages will be safe from deletion or archiving for five years.

So now we proceed with the creation of a folder that will be used to store all messages related to “Project XYZ” :

1. Open the Exchange Management Console. Navigate through the console tree to Organization Configuration > Mailbox
2. Select Mailbox.
3. Click the New Managed Custom Folder link in the Actions pane to launch the Managed Custom Folder wizard.
4. On the wizard’s initial screen, enter a name for the managed folder that you are creating. For the purposes of this practice session, name the folder Project XYZ.
5. Click New to create the folder.
6. When Exchange 2007 completes the creation of the “Project XYZ” folder, click the “Finish” button. The folder “Project XYZ” that was just created will now be listed on the Managed Custom Folders tab.