Forum Discussion
How does Purview/data lifecycle management on Mailboxes work for deleted mailboxes?
I have an inkling that it more or less keeps the Mailbox in the Recoverable Items set//folder/dimension, but I don't want to guess. We do not have a license for Purview, I just have discovered that we have policies in here setup and forgotten about (or migrated Compliance and Security, and forgotten about). I say this because I don't fully understand Purview (because I don't want to use it, and we don't have it), yet I have a 'keep forever' policy set on ALL Exchange Mailboxes, but it doesn't actually prevent me from Deleting them.
Reading https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/retention-settings#configuration-information-for-exchange-mailboxes-and-exchange-public-folders and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/retention-policies-exchange#whats-included-for-retention-and-deletion doc, the word 'mailbox' appears 54 times. I have responsibilities and a life, but I did manage to find out when MAIL is deleted from Deleted Items, it goes to 'recoverable items' - a folder that exists in (somewhere). What I don't know is what happens if the entire Mailbox is deleted. I have archiving turned off. I notice that there is a separate 'https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/inactive-mailboxes-in-office-365' article. I genuinely do not have the time or patience to read these massive docs, or the 100 other docs they link to, for a platform way outside my scale, that I don't intend on using.
Anyone know? I need to understand how this works before I get approval on removing it.
3 Replies
In the mailbox is under the scope of a Purview retention policy/hold, you will be prevented from deleting it, until all holds are removed. You can however delete the corresponding user object, which in turn transforms the mailbox as "inactive" one. Data will still be preserved until for the duration of the hold.
Thanks Vasil. If this is the case, why do you think I would have been able to delete a number of non-user (shared) mailboxes up to this point? I've been heading a project to clean up 20yrs of mailboxes, and it's only recently that I've been prevented from doing so. I wasn't really paying attention to user vs shared up until now, but I THINK most of what I managed to remove were shared, mostly unused ones made without thinking in the past. Is there a minimum data trigger that makes a mailbox eligible for retention coverage?
It depends where you initiate the deletion from. You can still delete the user object, just not the mailbox directly. And if you remove the license before the user object deletion happens, the Inactive mailbox "conversion" doesn't occur.
