Compliance archiving and legal holds

Compliance archiving keeps a copy of every message a team's users send and receive, apart from their mailboxes, for a set time. What users delete, move or empty from Trash stays in the archive. A legal hold keeps archived mail past that time until it is lifted, for a court case, an audit or an investigation.

The team's plan must include Compliance archiving. Only the team's owners can see and change the archive: not its admins, and not team API keys. On the platform side, staff need the legal permission.

Turning it on

In the domain admin panel (or the admin panel's tenant page), find Compliance archive, tick Archive the team's mail and choose how long to keep it (2555 days, 7 years, by default). From the command line:

sudo corpsuite tenant archive set acme enabled:=true retentionDays:=2555

Archiving starts with the next message; mail from before is not copied in. What is archived:

every message delivered to a user (from outside or from a colleague), as it arrived, after filters but before anyone touches it;
every message a user sends, from webmail or a mail app, with every recipient (Bcc too).

Automatic replies, forwarding by filters and messages copied in by an import are not archived as sent; the forwarded or replied-to message itself is archived when it arrives.

Turning archiving off stops new copies. What is already archived stays until its time is up.

Retention

Each copy is kept until it was archived plus the retention period. Making the period longer keeps mail already archived longer too. Making it shorter applies to mail archived from then on, so shortening it cannot wipe what is there. Every hour, copies past their time are deleted, unless a hold keeps them.

Legal holds

A user: Hold a user, pick them and give the matter. Their archived mail is kept until the hold is lifted. They are not told. corpsuite mailbox hold sam@acme.com reason="Smith v. Acme".
The whole team: tick Hold all archived mail with the matter. corpsuite tenant archive set acme hold:=true holdReason="Audit 2026".

A hold placed by the platform (for a subpoena or other lawful request) can only be changed or lifted by the platform; the team sees it but cannot lift it. Lifting a hold lets the hourly clean-up delete what is past its time.

Searching and downloading

Search looks through the subject, sender, recipients and text, and can narrow to a user, sent or received, and dates. Download gives the message exactly as archived, as an .eml file any mail app opens.

sudo corpsuite tenant archive search acme q="quarterly numbers" address=sam@acme.com from=2026-01-01
sudo corpsuite tenant archive message acme 912 > message.eml

The access log

Every search (with its terms and how many it found), every download and every change to the settings or holds is logged with who did it: Access log in the panel, or corpsuite tenant archive log acme. The log cannot be edited or cleared by the team.

Good to know

The archive counts as the team's data: when a lawful request covers content, the platform can export it with the archive's download or a legal export.
Archived mail does not count against users' mailbox quotas.
The archive keeps each user's address, so it outlives the user.