[Article] How to exclude Tasks from being archived

📌 Note: This article was originally created by Alex Rizeanu MSFT, a valued member on Answers Support Community. It provided meaningful insights and proved helpful to many. We're recreating it here on their behalf to preserve its value and ensure continued access for others.

Office 365 offers a very useful option in Online Archives. It allows administrators and users to make use of additional storage which helps free up the primary mailbox and keep it tidy and neat. It’s very flexible and customizable, administrators having the possibility to define custom retention tags and policies.  And for the most part using the tags and policies is straight-forward. With one exception. Tasks. You can change/add/remove various retention tags on all folders within your mailbox, except for the Tasks folder.

You cannot change the retention tag on the Tasks folder because it automatically inherits the Default tag set on the mailbox.

(To give a bit of context, there are three types of tags one can create in Office 365: default tags, which apply to the mailbox in it’s entirety, tags which apply to default folders automatically (inbox, deleted items, sent items etc.) and personal tags (which can be manually applied to folders or items).

NOTE: Only default and personal tags can be used for archiving. Default folder tags can only be used for deletion.)

The default retention policy with which all Office 365 tenants are configured has a default tag for automatically archiving items after 2 years.

There may be situations where you plan a task for more than 2 years in the future.  Using the default retention policy, this task will be archived before it’s triggered.  So how do we go about solving this?

As I mentioned earlier, the Tasks folder inherits the parent folder tag, which is the default tag, and this inheritance cannot be changed.

One way to ensure that your tasks remain untouched is to have a default tag configured to never archive. This can be easily done by logging into your Office 365 tenant, browsing to the Exchange Admin Center, Compliance Management, Retention Tags. Click on the plus sign and select “applied automatically to entire mailbox (default)”:

Enter a name for your tag and select the option to never archive:

As you can imagine, it wouldn’t make much sense to have a retention policy which will never archive any items. To work around this we will create an additional personal tag which we will configure to archive items after 2 years.

We will again give a name to the tag and configure it to archive items after 2 years.

Once we have these two new tags created, we can either edit the default retention policy to remove the old default tag, and add the two new tags created, or create a completely new policy and add the two new tags (along with any other tags you might find useful).

The only thing left to do is to change the retention policy on the mailbox (if you created a new one) and apply the archive tag to each folder individually using either Outlook or Outlook Web App.

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