Exchange has a brilliant feature called ‘Email approval’ that can be configured using mail flow rules. This allows emails to configured recipients to be redirected to a user or a mailbox where it must be approved before reaching it’s final destination.

By default, any emails awaiting approval for between 2-7 days will expire and will be automatically rejected and this is entirely dependent on when the system task runs to clear the mailboxes.

This is less than ideal for a variety of reasons, for example what if an email is received late Friday and isn’t reviewed, it’s possible and quite likely it would of expired by time Monday rolls around.

Luckily this can be extended quite easily using the Exchange Management Shell or Exchange PowerShell using the solution below –

The Solution

Firstly, run this command to verify that the expiry period is 2 days:

get-retentionpolicytag moderatedrecipients | select AgeLimitForRetention

You should see the ‘AgeLimitForRetention‘ listed as 02.00:00:00, or 2 days exactly.

To change it, use the following command:

set-retentionpolicytag moderatedrecipients -agelimitforretention 05.00:00:00

Where ’05’ in this example is 5 days. This can be changed as required to extend or reduce the expiration of emails in the approval queue.