Customizing data retention policies

AhaSend retains message data and metadata for 30 days by default, aiding in maintaining a record of sent emails, conducting audits, and troubleshooting issues. However, there may be legal, internal, or privacy policies that prohibit retaining email information, especially when it contains sensitive data such as financial, health, or legal information. With AhaSend, you can specify the retention period for message data and metadata in our databases, ensuring compliance with all relevant laws and regulations in your industry.

Message data and metadata

Message metadata is the minimal information kept on AhaSend to identify individual messages and keep track of delivery of the message. The following data is saved as the message metadata:

• Message ID

• Email Subject

• Message direction: outbound or inbound (whether the message was sent by you or received on one of your domains)

• From email address

• Recipient email address

• Status (received, delivered, deferred, bounced, failed)

• Delivery attempt logs

• Delivery time

Message data is the full email data. It includes all the information about email:

• All email headers

• HTML body

• Plain text body

• Attachments

Account-wide Retention Period

Message data and metadata are retained in AhaSend for up to 30 days, with the default retention period for both set at 30 days. You can modify these default retention periods in your account settings. While you can completely disable the retention of message data, the minimum retention period for message metadata is 1 day.

Override retention period for individual messages

While you can set the default retention periods for your account in the account settings, specific email messages may have different retention requirements. You can override the default account retention period by setting these headers on individual emails:

• Set the ahasend-metadata-retention header to an integer between 1 and 30 to specify the metadata retention period for the email in days. Any values outside this range will be ignored.

• Set the ahasend-data-retention header to an integer between 0 and 30 to specify the data retention period for the email in days. Setting it to 0 will disable data retention for that email. Any values outside this range will be ignored.

Both these headers will be removed from the email before it is delivered to the recipient.