Creating an end-user deletion schedule

An end-user schedule continuously looks for people who have not been active for the period you set, and deletes them.

An end-user schedule continuously looks for people who have not been active for the period you set, and deletes them. Most accounts accumulate users who wrote in once, years ago: a name and an email address held for no purpose, which is exactly what a retention policy exists to stop.

Create one

1. Open Admin Center > Account > Security > Deletion schedules.
2. Create an end-user schedule.
3. Set the period of inactivity that qualifies.
4. Check how many users that covers before enabling it.

Once it is on, eligible users start being deleted within 72 hours of meeting the criteria.

The clock resets on any activity

If your schedule deletes after a year of inactivity and somebody comments on a ticket in month eleven, they are not deleted. The clock starts again, and they qualify a year after that comment.

That makes the schedule considerably safer than it sounds, and it is the answer to the worry that a returning customer might vanish between two contacts.

Users with open tickets are skipped

Somebody who is still the requester on a ticket that is not closed cannot be deleted at all. Attempting it by hand returns:

User is requester on [x number of] tickets that are not closed

One side effect: if the person is only CC'd on unclosed tickets rather than the requester, they are removed as a CC of those tickets.

What happens to their tickets

The tickets stay. The person's name in system fields becomes Permanently Deleted User, and the conversations remain as they were. So this schedule cleans up records, not content: anything personal inside a ticket has to be redacted separately, and that is easier before the profile is gone.

Inactivity is not the same as gone

A customer who has not written in three years may still be a customer. If your business has long gaps between contacts, base the period on something better than silence.

Order is decided for you

Only one schedule runs at a time unless you have the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on. If you also want a ticket schedule, you are choosing which of the two is active rather than running both, so decide which policy matters more this quarter.

Watch out for agents

This covers end users, not agents. Confirm that nobody who should keep access is caught, particularly in accounts where staff also appear as end users.

See also

• Creating a ticket deletion schedule
• Redacting identified personal data
• Managing your deletion schedules