Increasing expiry period of moderated distribution list messages - Exchange 2010/2013

Discussion in 'Guides and Tutorials' started by Howard, Sep 22, 2014.

  1. Howard

    Howard Member

    Joined:
    Sep 18, 2014
    Messages:
    11
    Likes Received:
    6
    How to increase the expiry / retention period of messages sent to moderated distribution lists - Exchange 2010 / 2013

    Our organisation uses Exchange 2010 and 2013 to host a number of distribution lists, often with large numbers of recipients.

    The managers of these mailing lists have requested that they are all moderated, meaning that they receive a message in Outlook with an 'Approve' or 'Reject' option for each email sent to each mailing list. This is designed to eliminate spam to these mailing lists in the event that they are public-facing.
    Now, this is all well and good. However, Exchange, by default deletes these messages after 48 hours if they are not moderated. If you attempt to approve a message after this period, it will fail and at this point the message is gone.

    To me this is quite daft, for one major reason (among others): weekends. If somebody emails the mailing list on a Friday afternoon after the 'moderators' have left for the weekend, the message will expire on Sunday afternoon.

    It took quite a bit of research in order to find out how to change this rather stringent limit, but it is possible within the Exchange Powershell console.

    Firstly, run this command to verify that the expiry period is 2 days:

    get-retentionpolicytag moderatedrecipients |fl

    You should see the '
    Agelimitforretention' listed as 02.00:00:00, or 2 days exactly

    To change it, use the following command:


    set-retentionpolicytag moderatedrecipients -agelimitforretention 05.00:00:00

    Where '05' in this example is 5 days. Vary it to suit your requirements.

    Re-run the first command in order to verify that the change has been made.

    Hopefully this will help avoid scratching of heads in the event that moderation is widely used.
     
    InsaneNutter likes this.

Share This Page