How to Configure Email Retention Policies using Google Vault

The Importance of Data Retention

In highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, or government contracting, an organization cannot simply allow employees to delete their emails permanently. If a company is sued, or if an auditor demands records of a specific financial transaction from three years ago, the IT department must be able to produce those emails—even if the employee emptied their Gmail trash folder two years ago.

To comply with these legal requirements, Google offers Google Vault, an eDiscovery and information governance tool built directly into the Google Workspace ecosystem. By configuring a retention policy in Google Vault, you can force Google’s servers to silently keep a hidden copy of every single email sent or received by your organization, regardless of what the user does in their Gmail interface.

Step 1: Accessing Google Vault

Google Vault is not accessed through the standard Google Workspace Admin Console. It has its own dedicated interface.

1. Open your web browser and navigate to vault.google.com.
2. Log in using your Super Administrator credentials.
3. On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Retention.

Step 2: Defining a Custom Rule

While you can set a “Default Rule” that applies to the entire company indefinitely, best practices dictate creating Custom Rules targeted at specific Organizational Units (OUs). For example, you might only be legally required to hold emails for the Finance department for 7 years, while the rest of the company only requires a 3-year hold.

1. Click the Custom Rules tab at the top of the screen.
2. Click Create.
3. Under Service, select Gmail. Click Continue.
4. Under Scope, select the specific Organizational Unit (e.g., “Finance”) you want the rule to apply to. Click Continue.

Step 3: Setting the Duration and Action

Now you must define exactly how long the data is held, and what happens when that time expires.

1. Duration: Choose how long to retain the emails. For a 7-year hold, enter 2555 days. You can also select Indefinitely, though this is rarely recommended for data privacy reasons.
2. Start Date: By default, this is the date the email was sent or received.
3. Action after expiration: This is the most critical setting.
   • If you select Purge messages only from Gmail, the email is deleted from the user’s inbox but kept in Vault (highly unusual).
   • If you select Purge messages from Gmail and Vault, the email is permanently destroyed from Google’s servers the moment the 7-year timer expires. This is known as automated data lifecycle management.

Click Create to finalize the rule.

How Vault Overrides User Actions

Once this 7-year rule is active, let’s examine what happens if a Finance employee receives an email today and immediately deletes it, emptying their trash folder.

To the user, the email is gone forever. It frees up their Google Drive storage quota, and they cannot search for it in Gmail. However, if a Legal team logs into Google Vault five years from now and performs a search for that user’s inbox, the “deleted” email will instantly appear in the search results, fully intact with all attachments, because the 7-year retention rule shielded it from true deletion on Google’s backend servers.