if your archiving data to be deleted already resides in the archive mailbox, you can simply disable archive mailboxes (DISABLE, not REMOVE)

just make sure that your mailbox (and maybe locally synced) userdata matches properly. In theory, overwriting the Archive GUIDs of a mailbox would also wipe the data in the archive mailbox... but doing something like that is a no-no

Option A: End User (Outlook / OWA)

✅ Suitable for small‑scale cleanups
❌ Not practical for large volumes

Option B: Admin – PowerShell (Targeted Cleanup)

• Create a compliance search scoped to the archive,
• Preview results,
• Purge (SoftDelete or HardDelete)

✅ Works for bulk deletion
⚠️ Will fail if retention or holds apply

Example:

New-ComplianceSearch -Name "ArchiveCleanup" `

-ExchangeLocation email address removed for privacy reasons `

-ContentMatchQuery 'kind:email AND received<01/01/2022'

Start-ComplianceSearch "ArchiveCleanup"

New-ComplianceSearchAction -SearchName "ArchiveCleanup" `

-Purge -PurgeType HardDelete

Yes you can delete mailbox data stored in the online archive.

1. Open archive mailbox - delete folders/items which is the fastest way to delete
2. Delete data using retention policy
3. Hard delete if requirement is to delete all online archive data - unassign the license and Microsoft will soft delete the archive
4. eDiscovery purge option

Hope this give you more info.

Hi Thao_Dao_Phuong​, you have three options for this:

1. Use Outlook to open the archive mailbox and manually delete the data.
2. Delete the archive mailbox altogether (and then create a new, empty one if you need archiving).
3. Use Microsoft 365 retention policies to delete data in the archive based on age (see https://learn.microsoft.com/purview/set-up-an-archive-and-deletion-policy-for-mailboxes for details).

Hope this helps!

Hi Thao_Dao_Phuong​, you have a couple of options for doing this:

1. Use Outlook to open the archive mailbox and delete the data manually.
2. Delete the archive mailbox altogether (and then provision a new one if you still need archiving).
3. Use Microsoft 365 retention policies to delete data after a certain age. See https://learn.microsoft.com/purview/set-up-an-archive-and-deletion-policy-for-mailboxes for details.

Hope this helps!