Data retention

Mailway archives every message byte-for-byte — and keeps it for exactly as long as your window says: your plan’s, or a shorter one you set. Retention is a guarantee in both directions: content is never deleted inside your window, and it does not linger indefinitely after it.

Plan	Retention window
Free	30 days
Pro	90 days
Team	180 days
Business	1 year
Enterprise	custom

The window counts from the moment a mail is ingested. See Limits & quotas for the full plan matrix.

Set your own window

Your plan’s window, with any retention add-on, is the longest window you can set. Inside it, the window is yours to choose: you are the controller of the personal data in the mail you send, so set it to match your own retention policy. An admin sets it in the console under Team settings → Retention:

Team default — applies to every project that doesn’t set its own.
Project window — overrides the team default, shorter or longer, up to your plan’s window. Useful when projects send for different clients, or when password resets and invoices need different windows.
At least 7 days. If your retention is unlimited (for example, with the unlimited add-on), you can set any number of days from 7 to 36,500, or leave it unlimited.

A shorter window takes effect 30 days after you save it. Until then, Mailway keeps applying the window you had before, so you can change it back before the shorter window deletes anything. A longer one applies at once, but content already deleted does not come back.

If your plan’s window later becomes shorter than a window you set, the plan’s window applies 30 days after the plan change, and your setting comes back if the plan grows again. A mail moved to another project follows that project’s window at once, with no 30-day wait: if that window is shorter, the next nightly run deletes content older than it, so the console asks before such a move and names the day the content goes. Before you shorten a window, the console shows how many mails lose their content, when they were sent, and from which date. Every change is recorded in the team’s audit log, with who made it and when; admins can review the log on Business and up.

Need a longer window?

Retention add-ons extend any plan’s baseline — +1 year, +3 years, +7 years, or unlimited — and they stack on top of whatever your tier includes, so a compliance horizon doesn’t force a tier upgrade. A Pro team with the +7 years add-on keeps content for 7 years and 90 days; the unlimited add-on switches automatic expiry off entirely, so content is not deleted on a schedule. Add-ons apply team-wide from the moment they’re active and are managed from the console’s Billing page.

What deletion removes

A nightly job (03:00 UTC) removes the stored artifacts of every mail older than your window:

The message content — body, attachments, headers, and the raw source. This is a real deletion from storage, not a soft hide.
The metadata of a mail sent through the HTTP API — the values you sent with it. New webhook events for the mail carry metadata: null. An event built before this keeps its copy in the webhook delivery log, which keeps each delivery for 30 days, and a retry or redelivery sends it unchanged.
The wire transcripts — the inbound SMTP session log and the per-attempt provider conversation logs. Transcripts are part of a mail’s evidence, so they follow the same window as the content.
Live share links — any still-active mailway.to link for the mail is revoked in the same sweep, before anything else. A link never outlives the content it exposes.

What stays on record for the life of the account

Deleting content does not erase history. For every mail, Mailway keeps:

The delivery record — the state (Delivered, Bounced, Rejected, …), the timeline, every send attempt with its provider, duration and outcome, provider delivery events, and the mail’s tags.
The envelope details — sender, recipients, subject, size, timestamps. Your stats, search, and billing history keep working unchanged.
The SHA-256 fingerprint of the original content, recorded at ingest — it outlives the content itself.
Issued proof-of-delivery certificates — they verify offline from their own embedded hashes, so a certificate issued before the window closed still verifies offline after the content is gone. See proof of delivery.

In the console, an expired mail states this plainly: “Content no longer stored”, with its project’s window and the exact timestamp the content was removed. Sharing and raw download disappear for that mail; everything else stays.