E-mail retention policies do not work after you apply them in Outlook 2002

When you apply the Microsoft Outlook 2002 e-mail retention policies, none of your .pst mail items that match the criteria for deletion are actually deleted. This means that when you apply the Outlook 2002 e-mail retention settings policies, mail items that are located in your Exchange mailbox or in the .pst file are not archived according to the settings you specify.

This behavior occurs because the retention policy is enabled. Therefore, archived mail items are moved to the Sent Items folder instead of to the archive folder that you want.

To resolve this issue, remove or disable the retention policy.

To work around this issue, use the AutoArchive feature in Outlook to archive or delete mail items in a .pst file.

For additional information about how to use the AutoArchive feature, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

The following Outlook system policies are available (but not used by Outlook) in the Outlk10.adm file:

• RetentionOn: Indicates that retention policy will or will not be used.
  
  Note If RetentionOn is turned off (disabled) or missing from the registry, a message in the AutoArchive dialog box states the following:
  The network administrator has not set retention policies for this mailbox.
• RetentionInbox: Indicates the threshold (in days) at which items in the Inbox are acted upon.
• RetentionMail: Indicates all mail folders, not including the Inbox.
• RetentionCalendar: Dictates the maximum age (in days) for a calendar item in any folder.
• RetentionOther: Holds the threshold (in days) for all other folders acted upon by AutoArchive (including the Deleted Items folder).
• RetentionDelete: Determines whether the item subject to the retention policy is permanently deleted or moved to Deleted Items folder.
• RetentionPath: Stores the path to the company intranet Web page pertaining to the corporate retention policy.

If you apply these policies, they will be added to the following registry subkey: For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: