Patent ID: 8131809

Claim:
A method for online archiving of messaging objects, the method comprising: identifying, by an electronic computing system, an archive retention policy tag in a set of available archive retention policy tags as an applicable archive message retention policy tag for a message object stored in a source mailbox; wherein identifying the applicable archive retention policy tag comprises: determining, by the electronic computing system, whether the message object explicitly specifies an archive retention policy tag when a property of the message object specifies an identifier of the archive retention policy tag, wherein the identifier is a globally unique identifier that specifies the archive retention policy tag; and identifying, by the electronic computing system, the retention policy tag explicitly specified by the message object as the applicable archive retention policy tag after determining that the message object explicitly specifies the archive retention policy tag; determining, by the electronic computing system, whether a retention period specified by the applicable archive retention policy tag has expired for the message object; generating, by the electronic computing system, a copy of the message object at the archive mailbox after determining that the retention period specified by the applicable archive retention policy tag has expired for the message object; and deleting, by the electronic computing system, the message object from the source mailbox after determining that the retention period specified by the applicable archive retention policy tag has expired for the message object.