24-hour Message Expiry

Message expiry is an optional, organization-wide access policy. When enabled, access to each message ends after 24 hours.

Request message expiry

Contact our team about early access. Message expiry is off by default. Our team will confirm availability and activation for your organization.

Before you request

Review the impact with your organization owner and the team responsible for your integration:

• The policy applies to existing and new messages. Existing messages older than 24 hours become inaccessible once activation takes effect.
• Replies, forwards, and drafts cannot read expired source messages. Scheduled sends that require an expired source message fail and are not automatically replayed if the policy is later disabled.
• Message lists and search results omit expired messages. A page can be short or empty while still returning a next_page_token; continue paging until no token remains.
• Thread summaries and fields are recalculated from accessible messages. Threads with no accessible messages are unavailable. Thread requests that exceed the processing time limit can return 503; integrations should handle retries.

How it works

The 24-hour window starts when AgentMail records the message’s creation time. The sender’s email date and later label updates do not restart the window.

Direct reads of expired messages and their content return not found. Batch get and batch update requests omit expired messages from successful responses. Expired download links can return 403. Explicitly deleting an expired message is still supported.

The window applies to each message record. It is not a guarantee that the same content cannot appear in another message or inbox with a separate access window. IMAP may still list expired message metadata, although message content is unavailable.

Activation and existing copies

Our team will confirm when activation takes effect. Cached access settings may take several minutes to refresh. Download links issued before activation can remain usable until their original expiry, normally up to one hour. New message content links issued under the expiry policy cannot outlive the message’s access window.

Previously downloaded content and content copied into drafts or other systems are independent copies and are not withdrawn by expiry. Webhook payloads accepted for delivery before expiry can still be delivered or retried after the 24-hour window and may contain message content.