In recent months we’ve been receiving quite a few questions from customers regarding auto-expanding archives. I’d like to clear up some of the misconceptions and answer some of the most frequently as...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Dear Microsoft Exchange Team,
I recently came across a small infrastructure, where AutoExpandingArchives where enabled by accident, because the Main Microsoft Article does not point out this fact, that this once enabled feature, can not be disabled!
This is very frustrating as an administrator. Because what happens if you don't want Online-Archives to be enabled and visible on certain users?
In the official Article form Microsoft (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/autoexpanding-archiving) is not really clear in terms of the implications what happens on a Users if he has "only" a Exchange Online Plan 1 License assigned to the mailbox. Does the Inplace Archive activate itself and is the AutoExpandFeature now active or not?
How can one administrator conquer the negative Effects on a "normal" Users Mailbox, where he does not want an Archive active? Unassigning the Retention Policy will not help, it just avoids that data is moved from the primary Mailbox to the Archive.
I can understand why there is no possibility to go back to a disabled Org-Wide AutoExpandFeature, because of potential data-loss. But the possibility should be there to disable this via Microsoft support. Which is currently not the case.
Thanks for the clarification.