Online Archiving is the email archiving service at Imperial College London and is provided by Office 365. Archives from the old Enterprise Vault archiving service have been migrated to Office 365. If you had used Enterprise Vault before (2015 and prior), your archived emails from there can be found in your Office 365 archive mailbox.

Accessing your archived emails

You can access your archived emails by going to the Online Archive folder in the left-hand navigation of the desktop version of Outlook. If you do not have Outlook, you can search your archive online via Outlook for web. In Outlook for web, the folder is called Personal Archive (it will be called In-Place archive if you have been here less than two years) located on the left-hand side of the page, under your primary mailbox.

Messages are moved to a folder in the archive mailbox that has the same name as the source folder in the primary mailbox. If a folder with the same name doesn't exist in the archive mailbox, it’s created when the message is moved.

Archive retention rules

If you would like to change the archive retention policy on a specific folder you can do so using Outlook for web. Right-click on a folder in your mailbox, choose Assign Policy and under Archive Policy, choose the one you prefer. Make sure that you are choosing an archive policy, not a delete policy. 

  • Personal 6 months move to archive: Moves emails to archive after 6 months.

NOTE: If the “Personal 6 months move to archive” policy is not visible, you can add it to the list under mail settings. Click on the cogwheel in the upper right corner then under Your app settings choose mail. Under options on the right side, click on Retention policies and click on the plus sign. Add the Personal 6 months to archive and click save. This should now appear under assign policy.

  • Personal 1 year move to archive: Moves emails to archive after 1 year.
  • Personal 5 year move to archive: Moves emails to archive after 5 year.
  • Personal never move to archive: No email will be archive from this folder.
  • Use Parent folder policy: This uses the policy on the parent folder which is the default policy that archives email after two years

If you would like to disable archiving completely, please contact the ICT Service Desk.

Limitations of Online Archiving

Online Archiving cannot be accessed via mobile devices and from Outlook for Mac 2011.

Leaving College

You can export your archive emails via Outlook by following the steps in this article: Backing up and recovering emails

If you do not have Outlook, you can contact the ICT Service Desk to arrange this, but please give as much notice as possible.