Forum Discussion
Restore deleted conversation in an Office 365 Group
Yeah, we've been trying to get the Group folks to realize that exposing some additional folders for Groups is a must... Anyway, to answer your question, yes, it is possible, but you have to resort to some workarounds. The easier one is to open the Group mailbox via the OWA "add shared folder" functionality - it will expose all the Group folders and you will be able to drag/drop or move the conversation out of Deleted items.
Another method is to do it via tools such as the EWSEditor: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exovoice/2017/04/26/recover-deleted-items-from-a-group-mailbox-in-office-365/
Pinging TonyRedmond just to say "I told you so" :)
Hello, all. Just curious if anyone has successfully restored an Office 365 Group Conversation which was deleted by a "regular" user. So far, we have not been able to do this. Here's what we're seeing:
- Conversations deleted from Outlook for PC are permanently deleted (i.e., they do not go into the Group's Deleted Items folder nor the Deleted Items folder of the "deleter").
- Conversations deleted from within the Groups section of the Outlook Web App are permanently deleted (i.e., they do not go into the Group's Deleted Items folder nor the Deleted Items folder of the "deleter").
- Conversations deleted from within the actual Group's mailbox (accessed by using the Add Shared Folder functionality) are moved into the Deleted Items folder of the user who deleted the conversation. Note: you are not actually deleting an entire Conversation this way - you're deleting individual messages. Additionally, when you recover them, they get recovered to the Inbox of the user who deleted the message, not the Inbox of the Group. You then have to move the message to the Group Inbox. After you move the message back, things do seem to sync back up into a Conversation, and it will reappear in the Groups section of Outlook.
- Conversations cannot be deleted from Outlook for Mac.
So what we're seeing is that there is no way to recover a deleted Conversation. I say this because a "regular" user is not going to be accessing the Group using the Add Shared Folder function. They are going to be accessing it using the Groups section within Outlook or OWA.
If we've overlooked something, please let me know - we're excited about Groups but a little nervous about not being able to recover a Conversation.
As explained in the thread above, deleting conversations is no different that deleting a regular message in a mailbox, and the same recovery process applies. The only differences are due to the restricted UI presented for groups, but using EWS or the other workarounds mentioned will do the trick.