Document Purge
Getting Started
Your documents will remain in your account indefinitely unless the "Purge".
The purge process, when enabled, will purge all of your mailed documents and is generally used to comply with security or privacy policies.
In This Article and FAQ's
- Definitions
- What Information Will Remain?
- Are My Documents Completely Gone?
- Can My Documents Be Restored?
- Can I Keep Some Documents and Destroy Others?
- Which Jobs Have Been Or Will Be Purged?
- How Do I Start?
Definitions
The documents that were uploaded and mailed out. By “purged”, LetterStream means the “documents” are removed from the LetterStream.com website(s) and are no longer visible to the customer or anyone who has access to the account. By “customer” we mean all the users of a given account or anyone who has access to the account.
An “account” is the collection of user attributes, jobs, payments and all the other components that are uniquely available to and/or describe a given customer. An account may have one or more users. The users of an account can be found on the “Manage Users” page of the LetterStream website when accessed by a/the superuser of the account.
When we refer to “documents” we are specifically addressing the printable and viewable documents, not the data that makes up the job.
The “data” is the various pieces of information that is used to understand and/or create the mailing pieces. Through the course of job creation customers can load data (names, addresses, variable) and/or documents (pre-addressed pdfs). Either way, LetterStream will extract and maintain a search-able record of both Job Information and Recipient Information. Job Information contains who created the job, what date, when it was printed, when it was mailed, the job type, the number of pieces in the mailing, etc. Recipient Information contains the names and addresses of each recipient in the mailing. These pieces of information are maintained even after a our Document Purge Process.
What Mailing Information Will Remain?
The full recipient names and addresses will remain in your account as well as the job names, job numbers, and other metadata regarding the mailings.
Any saved items that exist on the Remembered Items page will also remain within the account.
Are My Documents Completely Gone
Due to a system architecture that governs our data security, redundancies and contingencies, your Documents will not be “completely gone” from all LetterStream systems and services for a period of time after the purge days.
First, your documents will be removed from your account after the number of days that you specify. No users will be able to log in to your account and see these documents after that time because they are no longer on the LetterStream website.
However, by the time these documents are removed from the LetterStream website, backups have been performed, audit trails occur and various other archival and contingency processes may have been executed resulting in various copies of the documents. Through the passage of time, the documents will be further removed from our systems via automatic processes.
If They Are Not Completely Gone, Can they be Restored?
No. This process is explicitly designed to remove documents from our system without the ability to recover. While archival documents may linger in our system until automated processes remove them, they are virtually unavailable even to us.
Can I Keep Some Documents and Destroy the Rest?
LetterStream allows customers to determine a number of days that “documents” will be available in their account. This number of days effects every job that is within the specific customer's account. If you need various or a sub-set of documents to be maintained online, you will need to create another account.
Which Jobs Have Been Or Will Be Purged?
You won't be notified every time the purge process will run, so be mindful that your documents will be purged every number of days that you chose after they are mailed out. If you chose 15 days, your documents will be purged 15 days after mailing.
After the purge processes has run, you can see which jobs have been purged within the "Mailing Complete" section of your account under the job name. It will show as: Documents Purged (02/02/2025) (using the date the documents were actually purged on).
How Do I Start?
You need to be the account owner within the LetterStream account in order to enable the purge option. To start the purge process, log into your LetterStream account, hover over the My Account tab, click on Account Settings, in the lower-left area you'll have the option to enable the purge option.
You can specify the number of days after mailing that your documents get purge fro our system (15, 30, 45, 90, or 120).