Purging of Deleted E-mail
In order to maintain the efficiency of College mail servers, and reduce the effort expended to deal with the large number of e-mail messages marked for deletion that remain on the servers, ILS automatically deletes all messages marked for deletion after ten (10) days.
Each night, messages older than 10 days that are either marked for deletion or filed in the Junk folder are automatically removed. The age of the e-mail message is based upon the date stored in the “date” header line of the message, which is usually the first line in the message header.
This practice affects all Bates e-mail systems regardless of the client, including webmail and mobile device clients.
Background: ILS originally began removing deleted messages older than 30 days in May 2004. Prior to implementation of this practice, almost 25 percent of all of the e-mail messages stored on the College mail servers were marked for deletion, which caused serious performance problems and unnecessary resources devoted to backing up unwanted files. The continued growth in the amount of e-mail requires a shorter time frame for keeping messages marked for deletion by the user.