I knew a place where Exchange was configured to delete all mails after 6 months. Soon after I discovered that people started to form circles in which they would forward older mails from internal mailing lists to each other to retain them longer than that.

Fannie Mae did this. When you have targets on your back you minimize the collateral damage from possible blowback.

Imagine getting sued and having the entire paper trail in your email going back 3+ years. I expire all email after 1 year.

A previous company I worked for had a one month retention window in the email server. People just ended up storing email in their local machine's Outlook folder so they can refer to old emails.

Or for the more technical folk with access to a linux server, setup postfix/dovecot, connect outlook to it and arrange for archived emails to go to the IMAP server.

The IT people get smart about looking for OST or PST files, but let's see them catch that :-)

Any pointers on getting started with the postfix/dovecot method?

If you have a Linux box (or a VM), install and configure it to route mail and provide IMAP support. Digital Ocean has the best tutorials for this:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

Then configure a new mail account in Outlook and connect to the IMAP server. It's optional, but convenient for replies, to configure the account to send via postfix if you have an internal SMTP server to connect to.

I gave up on email folders years ago, so at the end of the month would just create two new folders in the archive account (YYYYMM and YYYYMM_Sent) and drag all the mail from the Exchange account into the IMAP folders. Et voila! You now have your own local email archive.

I imagine it looks better at discovery time to say 'oh sorry we lost these emails because we ran out of disk space' rather than 'we deleted them because we didn't want you to read them'.

No, companies need to be able to point to an official retention policy that says in writing that emails older then x months or years get deleted. Most do (including my employer), and it's because of legal discovery. But it feels like we're lobotomizing ourselves, as often the reason some odd thing was done was based on a long-deleted email discussion.

And the right way to do it is with an archiving service/appliance

Archiving is likely solving the wrong problem, for legal reasons they don’t want those old emails hanging around.

Sounds like the retention policy is also solving the wrong problem. If for legal reasons you want to destroy any potential evidence, maybe it's a good idea to stop doing illegal actions.

It's not necessarily illegal actions, just those that would look bad in discovery. Lawyers (as always) tend to err on the side of caution.

I remember Matt Levine talking about how regulators would often find emails along the line of "Let's sell this crap to those idiots" and use that as leverage to force settlements rather than showing actual violation of regulations.

The reason being that it's hard to show intent to defraud, and much easier to threaten bad press.

Thanks to patents, everyone in technology is doing "illegal actions" all the time, since you can't do anything without infringing hundreds of patents. And if you can find an email somewhere indicating that someone knows that a competitor has feature X, or knows about the existence of a patent, viola, evidence of knowing infringement! Triple damages under US law.