Skip to content
MailwayMailway Docs

Data retention

Mailway archives every message byte-for-byte — and keeps it for exactly as long as your plan promises. 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 / unlimited

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

Need a longer window?

Section titled “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 — nothing is ever deleted. Add-ons apply team-wide from the moment they’re active and are managed from the Billing page.

What deletion removes

Section titled “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, the verbatim raw source. This is a real deletion from storage, not a soft hide.
  • 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 — permanently

Section titled “What stays on record — permanently”

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

  • The delivery record — state (delivered, bounced, rejected…), the pipeline timeline, every send attempt with its provider, duration and outcome, and provider delivery events.
  • The envelope metadata — 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 remains independently verifiable forever. See proof of delivery.

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