Storage and Shredding

The storage deadline

Stable stores each mail item until its storage deadline. The clearAt field on Mail Items contains the deadline. By default, this deadline is 30 days after the mail arrives.

Digital copies of mail are retained forever.

What happens at the deadline

Each address has a policy, configurable via the dashboard and defaulting to shred:

• Shred the mail (default).
• Ship the mail to a configured address.

When a mail item is shredded or shipped, other physical actions (ship, shred, etc.) will return HTTP 409.

Manually shred mail

To shred a mail item before its deadline, send a shred request:

curl -X POST https://api.usestable.com/v1/mail-items/mi_456/shred \
  -H "x-api-key: $STABLE_API_KEY"

You cannot undo a shred. Check the mail item ID before you send a request.

Shred events

Webhooks are sent for the following events, in generally this order:

1. mailItem.shred.processing
2. mailItem.shred.completed