Email retention policies are configured

Overview

Without retention policies, emails persist indefinitely in user mailboxes, creating liability for regulatory violations (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX), increased eDiscovery costs, and uncontrolled storage expenses.

Retention policies automatically manage email lifecycle by deleting or preserving messages based on compliance requirements, reducing legal risk, and ensuring regulatory record-keeping obligations are met.

Remediation

• Create and manage retention policies

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	Medium
Effort to fix	Medium
Impact on users	Medium
Pillar	Data
Category	Information Protection
Product	Purview
Feature	Data lifecycle management
Area	Data protection
Licence	RMS_S_PREMIUM, Microsoft 365 E3
Tenant	Workforce, External

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.