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 retention off entirely. 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.tolink 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.