Forum Discussion
Handling User Accounts Once a Person Leaves the Company
I can confirm the answer to my own question.
The user account is a pointer to the shared mailbox. If you delete the account the shared account will also be deleted in 30 days. You will lose all emails in that shared account.
HidMov From the article I linked to there is a statement;
"If the mailbox is smaller than 50GB, you can remove the license from the user, and stop paying for it. Don't delete the user's old mailbox. The shared mailbox needs it there as an anchor."
We did some experimenting recently. We deleted an old user's account and found that once we did that you could no longer send email to that account, however the shared mailbox and the data in it remained. We want to make sure this is the expected result and that we are not missing something that will come back to bite us later.
Our concern is that we don't want something to happen "30 days later" like the shared account is removed by the system because we were unaware of some odd rule.
I was entirely mistaken - I've just checked some of our clients and our own documentation and we've not deleted the original user account, but instead disabled it, so my original advice was incorrect - a timely reminder to myself to double check before posting 🙂 Apologies for the poor advice from myself.
I've just tested this on my tenant with an old account - it's still receiving email though the account has been disabled, and I get an NDR saying the user doesn't exist. I'll keep the user deleted and suspect that in 30 days the mailbox will disappear for good. The documentation and what you've already seen is expected behaviour.