I don't have the numbers for Google, but companies like Microsoft host e-mail archives regardless of deletion for something like a year. AOL claims that it host

I don't have the numbers for Google, but companies like Microsoft host e-mail archives regardless of deletion for something like a year. AOL claims that it hosts it indefinitely, but it would be nice to know what Google does. I wrote on this years ago: https://afreak.ca/blog/a-look-at-data-retention-and-law-enforcement/ https://afreak.ca/blog/a-look-at-data-retention-and-law-enfo... He should have left the e-mail account alone or at the very least made an offline archive if he truly wanted to look at the data for research reasons.