Why 7-day log retention isn't enough

"The customer says they never got the password reset email." It's one of the most common support tickets in any SaaS product, and how fast you can answer it depends entirely on how long your email provider keeps logs.

The math of a 7-day window

A lot of entry-tier plans cap log retention at 3–7 days. That sounds reasonable until you do the math on when support tickets actually arrive: a customer who didn't get an invoice email might not notice, or complain, for weeks. By the time it reaches an engineer, the log that would explain it is already gone, and "we don't know why" becomes the only honest answer.

What a useful log actually contains

• Full delivery timeline: queued, sent, delivered, opened, bounced, complained
• The raw SMTP response code, not a paraphrased summary
• Search by recipient, subject, domain, or status, not just a message ID you have to already know

90 days as a baseline, not an upsell

Retention is cheap to provide and expensive to lack. Storing 90 days of structured event data costs a rounding error compared to what it costs in support time, and in trust, to tell a paying customer "we can't check that anymore." It's worth treating as a baseline feature on every tier rather than a premium add-on reserved for the top of the pricing page.