Forum Discussion
Can't empty deleted items folder - Outlook 2016 / Exchange Online Plan 1
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
Why wasn't the retention policy working? Perhaps it was simply that the Managed Folder Assistant had skipped the mailbox for some reason (it uses a weekly workcycle) and the command used to get things going again was Start-ManagedFolderAssistant?
Unfortunately I don't know why it had stopped working, just know it must have done as inbox had four weeks of mail rather than the two weeks (14 days) it was supposed to contain and that was why it was hitting limit. Problem then got worse when I tried deleting loads of them manually, it wouldn't let me delete permanently so had to delete and put in deleted items, then I couldn't empty deleted items, so ended up over size limit and with bin not working/emptying
Using Start-ManageFolderAssistant then kicked it in to life (after purging RecoverableItems as well) and deleted folder went from 60000+ items (9gb+) to 0 items in about 6 hours
so does that mean a retention rule (the Managed Folder Assistant) only runs once a week normally? so even if doing 14 day retention, it may get to 20/21 days if only running once every 7 days normally?
The aim of the workcycle used by the MFA is to process mailboxes at least once at week. Often it happens more often. The exact details depend on server load. If you have a policy to remove items from the Deleted Items folder once they are 14 days old, they should be removed on that basis.
thanks for reply
Yes we have a 14 day deletions policy to delete all mail in inbox permanently if over 14 days old, so like this should avoid it going in deleted items.
Will keep monitoring mailbox now to make sure it works and doesn't creep up to 50gb again