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Darren Rose's avatar
Darren Rose
Brass Contributor
Dec 08, 2018
Solved

Can't empty deleted items folder - Outlook 2016 / Exchange Online Plan 1

Hi   Have a problems with Office 365 / Outlook 2016 / Exchange Online Plan 1   I have a service mailbox which has 60000 emails in deleted items folder and I can't empty it - tried in Outlook and ...
exchange
office 365
  • Darren Rose's avatar
    Darren Rose
    Dec 08, 2018

    Hi Chris

     

    Thanks for your reply and the suggested article which has certainly given me some useful notes for next time I have a problem

     

    In the end as the mailbox is critical to our business (process incoming mail for a document management system), I logged a support call with Microsoft and a really helpful chap advised it was due to the 14 day retention policy on mailbox not working and used some powershell commands to get it working

     

    So fingers crossed the 60000+ items in deleted items has now started to go down and 99% of my 50Gb used is now 85% so much improved

     

    Thank you for your reply

AndreKotze's avatar
AndreKotze
Copper Contributor
Oct 20, 2019
I'm having the exact same problem with an Exchange Online mailbox. Using PowerShell I was able to locate about 166000 emails from Dec 2017 to April 2019 worth 100GB which are stuck in the Purges folder but no matter what I do I'm unable to delete them.

The PowerShell commands MS Support gave me didn't work and with MFCMAPI I'm also not able to delete them.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated...
Chochi's avatar
Chochi
Copper Contributor
Nov 20, 2019

AndreKotze 

 

I am experiencing also... no Powershell scripts are working. When we delete items, they show back up in seconds. Issue is our 100GB mailbox limit keeps getting maxed out and I cant delete anything to make space. No litigation holds. 

 

Things tried:

  1. Search-Mailbox "mymailbox@contoso.com" -SearchQuery ‘(received=2018-01-01..2019-11-01)(sent=2018-01-01..2019-11-01)’ -DeleteContent -Force
  2. Start-ManagedFolderAssistant "mymailbox@contoso.com"
  3. Delete via OWA - items delete "temporarily" then reappear. 
  4. Tried using MFCMapi to delete the contents of the Deleted Items and Recovery Items
  5. New Exchange MRM Policy (delete anything 7 days or older)
  6. Enable a ExOL Archive mailbox, create a new Exchange MRM Policy to move anything older than 7 days to archive. 
  7. Delete from the Outlook client obviously... cached and uncached mode. 

 

Results: 

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics "mymailbox@contoso.com" -FolderScope "RecoverableItems" | Format-List Name,FolderAndSubfolderSize

 

Name : Recoverable Items
FolderAndSubfolderSize : 110 GB (118,111,612,814 bytes)

Name : DiscoveryHolds
FolderAndSubfolderSize : 92.84 GB (99,683,338,775 bytes)

 

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics "mymailbox@contoso.com" -FolderScope "DeletedItems" | Format-List Name,FolderAndSubfolderSize

 

Name : Deleted Items
FolderAndSubfolderSize : 79.86 GB (85,753,721,801 bytes)

 

 

None of the above worked. 

So this is very frustrating to say the least. MS ticket open but no fix at this time. 

 

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