Retention policy and deleted group

[Flyingbirds170]

Hello there.

I do have a question regarding retention policies on o365 groups and what happens to it after deletion. As I was testing my group, I deleted it, I was able to see it as softdeleted via get-unifiedgroup but I couldn’t see it as inactive mailbox anywhere, couldn’t pull mailbox statistics as well. I wasn’t able to do content search as it couldn’t find it. Am I missing something here? I thought mailbox would be preserved after deletion - like shared or user mailbox.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You won't "see" it, as it's not a "regular" mailbox, so it's not returned in the output of Get-Mailbox -InactiveMailboxOnly. It will however be preserved for the duration of the retention policy and can be searched via eDiscovery. Prefix the entry with . when performing an eDiscovery/Content search or just do a blank "include all" one.

[#3]

Understood, even after 30 days, correct? Can I force deletion of o365 group from a recycle bin to test it out like I can with users?

[#4]

You should be able to use Remove-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject to speed the process up, yes. Either way, any group under retention will be preserved for the duration of the retention period.

[#5]

Got it, will play around with it, either way thank you so much for confirmation and how to search them! I would never think I can’t search by name and have to search by email with a “.”.