Forum Discussion
Recreate a mailbox for an existing user?
OK, maybe a little fiddly and messy, but how about enabling the Online Archive for the mailboxes in this situation and then create a new Exchange Retention Policy In the Exchange Admin Center to move content to the archive which is older than 14 days (along the lines of the below). Assign this new retention policy only to the users who's mailboxes you want to clear out.
Once the move to archive has completed, disable the Online Archive for that user (making sure that you don't re-enable it for at least 30 days or the content will return). Then, make sure you assign the default retention policy back to that user.
You'd have to be very diligent about assigning this temporary policy. It could just as easily get you into trouble if assigned incorrectly. If you plan to give it a try, test it to the hilt first I would say.
1). Move the user in AD to an OU which is not synced.
2). Wait for/or force ad sync. The O365 user will be moved to deleted users folder.
3). Run the PowerShell to purge Deleted users
4). Move the AD user back to synced OU, run sync, and the user is recreated for you.
5). Assign licence. Good to go.
Maybe still not exactly what you want, but I think it is as good as you are going to get.
- Thanks Peter, this saved me during a migration in which a users In-Place Archive filled up because of a misconfiguration with the retention policy and I was able to blow out the mailbox and restart the migration. You rock man! Thanks!
I'm afraid you may be right. That leaves me with a user whose other cloud content is removed, which is bad in my case.
It's often the case in migration scenarios that users are provisioned in the service before their mail is migrated, so they start using things like OneDrive and SharePoint long before the mail switch. Migration testing may push data into the service mailbox that we want to purge before the actual migration. Recreating the user would mean the user loses all of their accumulated non-mail data.
