How does the Retention Add-on work?

Postmark will store the activity data (such as delivery, open, click and bounced events) and message content of your emails for 45 days by default. With our Retention Add-on, you can easily adjust the retention time from 7 to 365 days, depending on your needs. 

Any updates to your retention time will apply only to messages processed going forward - once a message expires, all activity data and message content will be queued for deletion, including bounce and spam complaints. Historical hard bounce and spam complaints can be found under the Suppressions section of your Message Stream or via our Suppressions API.

The activity retention time is an account wide setting, so it will be applied to all Servers and Message Streams. As always, aggregated statistics are stored indefinitely.

Each message will include the expiry date:

Changing your Activity Retention time #

The Retention Add-on is available on the Plans & Add-ons page in your Postmark account. From there, you can select the retention period in the Custom Activity Retention section.

The price for each retention period is based on your monthly email plan, so if you change your monthly plan, the retention prices will automatically adjust also. An overview of the retention prices for each monthly plan can be found below.

⚠️ Note that the Retention Add-on is only available on paid plans. The Retention Add-on is not available to customers on legacy credits-based pricing. Please switch to a subscription to enable the Retention Add-on. 

Upgrading and Downgrading your Retention Add-on #

Similar to how our monthly plan works, any changes to your retention period are applied immediately to your account, but any new charges (which are prorated based on when you upgraded) will happen at the start of your next billing cycle. If you downgrade your retention period (or move back to the default 45 days option), a prorated balance will be applied to your account at the end of the billing cycle. 

Since the Retention Add-on is only available on paid plans, if you downgrade your monthly plan to the Free developer plan, the Retention Add-on will automatically downgrade to the default 45 days option.

A breakdown of the costs can be seen on your checkout page, as well as on your receipt once your next billing cycle is charged. 

Can I disable all message content?#

The lowest retention period available in your account is 7 days, but we do have a special feature to disable all message content, which can be setup on a per server basis if you meet our requirements. Please contact our support team if you would like this feature enabled. 

What happens when a message expires? #

Once we reach the expiry date of an email, you will no longer see the message or any of the activity data related to that message in the UI — and you’ll no longer be able to access it via the API either. Plus, the message will get queued for deletion from our systems. If you’ve selected a retention time lower than 45 days, we remove the data from Postmark systems within 24 hours. If you selected longer retention times, it might take us up to 7 days to wipe the data from our systems. 

How much does the Add-on cost? #

The price for custom activity retention depends on both your monthly base plan and the time you’d like us to keep your data for. Here’s an overview of our pricing for all the combinations available today:
If you’re on a high-volume custom plan and would like to adjust your retention time, please reach out to us and we’ll help you get set up.