Deleting old contact form entries automatically

Choosing a period

There's no single right number. Ask how long you genuinely need an enquiry after you've answered it. A shop answering product questions might keep them for 90 days; an agency that quotes on projects might keep them for a year or two. Write the period into your privacy policy, too.

How the deleting runs

Many plugins rely on WP-Cron, which only runs when someone visits the site and is switched off on some servers — so the cleanup can silently stop. Mailbag Contact Form doesn't use WP-Cron at all. The cleanup runs when an administrator opens a page in the dashboard, or after a form is sent, and at most once every 12 hours. A site that's in use keeps itself tidy; a site nobody visits has no new entries to worry about.

What gets deleted

Under Mailbag → Settings → Privacy you set the number of days. Entries older than that are removed in full. Spam is handled separately: caught spam is kept for 30 days, at most 1,000 entries, so a real message filed as spam by mistake can still be recovered, and then it's gone.

Deleting an entry also tells any add-on through a WordPress action, so Mailbag Pro removes that entry from its own retry queue instead of trying to deliver something that no longer exists.

Deleting on request

Retention handles the routine. When one person asks to be forgotten, use WordPress' Erase Personal Data tool: Mailbag registers with it, so entries with that email address are found and deleted. See export and erase requests.