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Use cases → Admin and governance

Apply legal holds across mailboxes on a schedule

Set or update legal holds on user mailboxes automatically, ensuring new users and groups are covered as they appear.

Who it is forCompliance and IT teams responsible for eDiscovery and retention obligations.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.datatransfer, admin.directory.user

The problem

Manual legal hold management misses newly created users and groups, leaving gaps in compliance. Relying on periodic audits catches issues too late, risking loss of data that should have been preserved.

How it works

  1. Enumerate all users and relevant groups via the Admin SDK.
  2. Match each account against legal hold policy criteria (e.g., department, group membership).
  3. Apply or update the legal hold using the Data Transfer API for eligible users.
  4. Log all actions and errors for audit and reprocessing.

What changes

Legal holds are reliably and promptly enforced for every applicable account, including new joiners, with a clear audit trail.

The trap in this one. The Admin SDK's user list API is eventually consistent, so a user created moments before the scheduled job may not appear in the enumeration, and thus misses the hold. If your workflow assumes every user is included, you risk a silent compliance gap. Always re-scan recent joiners over several cycles, and never assume a single pass is complete.

Questions people ask

How quickly does a legal hold take effect after being applied?

Holds are generally effective immediately for new data, but propagation to all storage backends can lag. Always confirm via retrieval APIs before declaring a user as covered.

Can I apply holds to groups or OUs directly?

No, holds are applied at the user mailbox level. You must enumerate and update each user individually, using group or OU membership as policy logic.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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