Exchange Mailbox Policy: Shortcut Deletion

Shortcut Deletion does the following:

Deletes shortcuts that are older than the age you specify on this page.
Deletes orphaned shortcuts. These are shortcuts to items that have been deleted, typically by a user, from an archive.

Shortcut deletion is performed by the Exchange Mailbox Archiving task. When you run the task using Run Now, you can choose a Run mode that includes shortcut processing.

Delete shortcuts in folders. To delete shortcuts in mail folders, select this and specify the age at which shortcuts are to be deleted. There is a warning that users will need to use search to find archived documents. Click Yes.

Setting this makes Enterprise Vault delete old shortcuts but does not affect the corresponding archived items. Users can still search for the archived items.

For example, you could choose to delete all shortcuts older than 12 months, but retain archived items for several years.

Orphaned shortcuts:

Delete orphaned shortcuts. Select this to make Enterprise Vault delete shortcuts in mailboxes if the corresponding archived item has been deleted.

If you use shortcuts that contain text from the original message, those shortcuts might be useful to users even though the archived items have been deleted. However, deleting large shortcuts will regain space in the Exchange Server store.

When certain items such as calendar, task, and meeting items are archived, the original item is not replaced with a shortcut. By default, the archiving task does not delete the original items when it performs shortcut deletion. To include such items in shortcut deletion, configure the registry setting, DeleteNonShortcutItems. The setting is described in the Registry Values manual.