Allow customizable retention policy for Deleted Items
As far as I understand it, the Deleted Items folder in outlook.com has a default retention policy of just 10 days, which is not very long at all. And it's not possible for the user to change this.
When outlook.com provides us with a massive 15 GB of mailbox space - even more if we have Premium - there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to store our Deleted Items emails for much longer if we wish to. Previously I've used the Office 365 Business service for my email, and I had a 1-year retention policy for my Deleted Items, and hundreds of emails sitting in that folder, and yet my entire mailbox was no more than 1 GB.
Please allow users to change the retention policy to a longer period - up to 1 year at least. I don't mind if it's a feature reserved for Premium customers. It's not like we're going to be at risk of using up our mailbox space allotment.

6 comments
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Nick Young commented
Default retention policy is 10 days. With some legitimate mail falling into this folder, means it will be auto-deleted after 10 days. We should be allowed to change it from 10 days to whatever we wish.
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Jeremy commented
The point is that it should be up to the user to decide the retention policy, not Microsoft. If a user wants 30 days, or 60, or 1 year, then they should be able to set that themselves.
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janeintoronto commented
20 or 30 days would be fine. I do think it is a good idea to have things deleted after a certain time (unlike some programs). Many people have no idea the mails are still there. A friend unknowingly had 10 years of emails in her Deleted folder.
I make a folder called "MyDeletes" for things I'm not sure about and I clean it out every year or so. -
Anonymous commented
With all the extra correspondence coming in from prostitutes, it is obvious that people will fill up their deleted items far more quickly than before and Microsoft have recognised this. Subsequently they have cut the amount of time available to retrieve any items that have since become relevant
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Anonymous commented
The recent change in access to deleted items that restricted it to a matter of a day or so is a real disappointment. I found being able to dig out deleted emaikls from the past few months very helpful. Now that feature appears gone. Please bring it back. Thank you.
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Brian commented
I think it may be more than 10 days now, possibly up to 30 not counting the extra 30 you get via the "recover" feature, but MS would do well to allow everyone to adjust this.
Note Gmail, which doesn't touch delete mail at all the last time I looked.