How long email records are kept — Help

1pm keeps a record of the email it sends for you: who it went to, when, whether it arrived, and for some of it the text of the message itself. Those records are useful for exactly the reasons you would expect. They settle a question about whether a client received an invoice, they show you a bounced address before it costs you a booking, and they are the only copy of a conversation with a lead.

They are not kept forever. This article sets out how long each kind of record lasts, what happens at the end of that time, and what to do if you need something for longer. Read it before you need it, because once a record has aged out we cannot get it back.

Why there is a limit at all

Two reasons, and neither is storage cost.

The first is that these records contain other people's personal information. Every row holds a real person's email address, and some hold the text of what you wrote to them. Keeping that indefinitely, for clients whose event finished four years ago, is not a neutral act. Deleting it when it stops being useful is the responsible default and the one privacy law expects.

The second is that a record you can trust is worth more than a record you have a lot of. An email log stretching back to the beginning of time is harder to search and rarely answers a live question. The disputes that actually happen are about last month's invoice.

The three windows

Email records fall into three kinds, and they last for different lengths of time because they differ in how recoverable they are.

Lead conversations: about three years. This is the longest window, and it is the most important one to understand. When a lead replies to you, that reply arrives through 1pm, not into a mailbox you own. There is no copy in your own email. The thread in 1pm is the only record that the conversation happened and the only record of what was said. Because of that, we keep the message text far longer than anything else.

Client email text: about one year. When 1pm emails a client an invoice, a quote, a confirmation, an appointment or an automation email, it keeps a copy of what the email said. This is the shortest window, deliberately, because it is the most recoverable: the invoice itself is still in 1pm, unchanged, along with everything on it. The stored copy is there to answer "what wording did we use?" rather than to be the record of the transaction. The transaction record is the invoice.

Note that this is client-facing mail only. Crew mail and internal notices, meaning share links, RSVP invites, document prompts, rejection notices and the alerts 1pm sends you about your own account, are logged but their text is never stored. Open one of those in the Email Activity log and you get the full delivery history with no message body, which is expected rather than a fault. If the exact wording of a crew email matters to you, the place to look is the template or automation that produced it.

The log entries: about two years. The entry itself, meaning who an email went to, when it went, and what happened to it. This is what the Email Activity list is built from and what the delivery badges read.

What actually happens at the end

The two are different, so it is worth being precise.

When client email text or a lead conversation body reaches its window, the message text is cleared and everything around it stays. A lead thread keeps its shape: you can still see that a message was sent on a date, in which direction, and to whom. What goes is the words. This matters because a thread with holes punched in it would be worse than useless for understanding a booking's history.

When a log entry reaches its window, the row goes. The email drops off the Email Activity list, and with it the delivery result.

Records become eligible for removal at those points, and an automated nightly job clears them. So a record may sit for a little longer than the stated window before it goes. It will never go earlier.

What these windows do not touch

A great deal of what people assume is "email" is really a document, and documents are not on this clock:

Invoices, quotes, confirmations and credit notes stay in your account as long as your account does. Emailing one does not tie it to an email retention window.
Attachments and files live in your account's file storage and are governed by your account, not by this policy. Where files live in 1pm covers the five places a file can sit.
Contacts and everything on them, including the email address itself.
Leads themselves. Only old message bodies within a thread are cleared. The lead, its status, its dates, its value and its history remain.
The suppression list. If an address hard-bounced or reported spam, we go on remembering that after everything else about the email has gone. We have to: forgetting it would mean emailing a dead address again and damaging delivery for everyone.

If you need something for longer

You have three options, and all of them take a minute.

Export the log. Email Activity has an Export CSV button that downloads what your current filter shows, with the delivery result and the provider's own message id on every row. If you keep an annual compliance file, this belongs in it. Checking what emails went out covers the log in full.

Export the account. The full account export includes your email records and message text, along with everything else. It is one click and produces a ZIP. Exporting your data covers what is in it.

Save the document, not the email. For anything client-facing this is the better habit. Download the invoice or confirmation as a PDF and file it where you keep your paperwork. That copy is yours, it does not expire, and it is the thing a client or an accountant will actually ask for.

If a specific record matters to you, take a copy now rather than working out later that you needed one. There is no recovery once a window has passed, and no archive we can retrieve it from.

When the clock starts

On the date the email was sent or received, not the event date. A confirmation sent in January for a wedding in December is measured from January.

That trips people up, because the instinct is that a booking's paperwork ages from the event. It does not. If you are building a compliance file for a big event, export around the time the emails go out rather than waiting until after the event.

These windows can change

The windows above are what is in effect now. They are set deliberately and we do not expect to shorten them, but if they do change, the current values live here and in our Privacy Policy, which is the authoritative statement.

Account-level deletion is a separate matter and runs on its own timetable: see Removing inactive accounts for what happens to a trial that never converts or a subscription you cancel, and Deleting your 1pm account for deleting on purpose. Both remove your email records along with everything else, whatever their age.

Checking what emails went out for the Email Activity log itself.
Exporting your data for taking a full copy.
Removing inactive accounts and Deleting your 1pm account for account-level deletion.
Your rights over your data if you need a record removed sooner.