Error applying retention policy in security & compliance - "Recipient not Found"

[Steve Whitcher]

I'm trying to create a retention policy in the Security & Compliance center, but running into an error.  The policy seems to create successfully, but after a while if I open the details it will show a warning sign next to '1 distribution results found'.  Expanding that area, it looks like there was a problem applying the policy to exchange, with the message of "recipient not found".  As you can see below, it's not terribly informative:

Has anyone else seen this error?  Do you know what causes it, or how I can get more info to troubleshoot?  

<rant>I tried contacting support about this using the handy "notify support" link next to the error, but the rep didn't seem to understand what my goal was, much less understand this problem.  He said that the error is because exchange mailboxes have a max size of 100gb and if I set a retention policy to keep everything forever, mailboxes will be over 100gb and that causes this.  Then he tried to steer me towards creating a retention policy in the exchange admin center that moves content over 1 year old to archive.  Ugh... not the point at all.  </rant>

[#2]

Havent seen the error, but it certainly looks like something on the backend, problem with synchronization maybe. Ask the support guy to escalate...

[#3]

Did you apply the policy to all Exchange mailboxes or just selected mailboxes? If selected, do all the selected mailboxes still exist?

[#4]

When creating the policy, I chose the option to apply to it to "All Locations.  Includes content in Exchange email and public folders, Office 365 groups, and OneDrive and SharePoint documents." With that selected, there is no option to filter by mailbox. 

[#5]

I have the same problem.

[#6]

Me too - exactly the same problem...

The "Notify Support" link is pointless - it looks like a generic suggestion form.

I plan to open a Support Case today, so if I get anything useful by way of an explanation, I'll share it.

[#7]

Same here, let us know how you go with support.

[#8]

So I opened a case today, and though the support rep that I spoke to hadn't seen this specific issue before first-hand, some of his colleagues had, and they speculated that since we're mid migration to O365 (we're running a hybrid setup at the moment with Exchange 2010 on prem) it could be that the policy isn't able to apply itself fully, to as yet un-provisioned/un-migrated mailboxes. Hence the brilliantly descriptive error message...

Don't know if this stacks up with your situations too? or if you're all fully migrated/consuming O365... but the chap has provided me with his details, and advised that we complete our migrations first, and see if the error resolves itself once all mailboxes are provisioned/migrated, and if not, to reach out to him for further investigation.

[#9]

We're 'fully migrated', but of course once you go hybrid, there's no going back, so we still have an Exchange 2013 server in the mix.  All of our mailboxes were migrated a year or more ago, with the exception of 3 mailboxes associated with our on-prem exchange and sharepoint administrator accounts.  I wouldn't expect those to cause a problem for the retention policies, but I suppose it's possible.  

Of course, if this issue is as simple as a few specific mailboxes that the policy failed to apply to, I would expect that support could have identified and explained that, but. . . 

[#10]

I have this same issue and we are not hybrid - 100% cloud as we migrated over from Google. My case is open and the support tech advised I toggle the location for Exchange on/off. The error disappeared - for a day. Now it's back. We really need to know what it means - according to the mouse over - it could mean that the retention policy is skipping over the location (all of exchange?) or is it just the one recipient not found? Why can't we drill for details to see which mailbox? My support person is also investigating public folders - which I find laughable given that we have never used any (once again, coming from Google) and don't have a single one configured. Anyone have any progress on this? 

[#11]

I have this issue too. And to eliminate the hybrid I tried to create the same policy in my test tenant that has no dirsync or on-prem connection, and I get the same error.

Creating the policy I also choose "All Locations" but it seems to change it automatically.

So lets hear from someone that fixed this 🙂

[#12]

I have the same error, running the below command shed a little more light on the issue:

Get-RetentionCompliancePolicy -DistributionDetail | fl

The relevant part of the results:

DistributionStatus : Error
DistributionResults : {[Exchange]AllPublicFolderUnderRoot:Recipient not found: }

I disabled Public Folders in the retention policy, and now it has "On (Success)" as its status.  I wonder if the error occurs because we don't have any public folders, so the null trips up some code somewhere.  I just implemented the change, so I can't verify that the mailboxes were all put on hold.  At least the retention policy no longer has an error, so that's promising.

[#13]

That definitely looks like improper error handling in the code... Open a support case to report it IMO.

[#14]

Obviously this ppl is choosing to al folders but they dont have public folders so this cause a loop

[#15]

Using the Powershell I described earlier to ID the "missing recipient" and correcting it (turning off Public Folders) worked for me.  I can confirm all of the users in our tenant are covered by the retention policy.

[#16]

You will get this error if you have hybrid public folders (public folders on-premises) or if you have never created public folders either - like the example about migrating from Google by @Angel above.

If you have on-premises public folders, then either leave the retention policy in place (and showing an error) and that way when you do migrate your public folders they are covered from day one. Or remove public folders as a retention source. See https://c7solutions.com/2018/02/office-365-retention-policies-and-hybrid-public-folders for more.

[#17]

@Ilija Stojić 

I can also see the status as On(success) but how did you confirm that all users have got this policy ? When i run "Get-Mailbox eu1|select retentionholdenabled" the result shows as false. 
Is there any other place we can check to validate that its worked ?

[#18]

If you set a policy for all users it will not appear on the actual mailbox, but in the organisation settings instead

[#19]

@Brian Reid 

I did set policy to all user and I have done a Get-OrganizationConfig but still didn't see anything related to the retention policy i created in compliance admin center.

is there any other way to validate this ?

[#20]

Happens when you need to remove a location from a Retention policy especially Public folder Location, but I found that using
Connect-IPPSSession
Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "Affected Retention Policy" -RemovePublicFolderLocation All
Ran a Sync diagnostics for Company Object on the tenant so it propagates immediately