Converting Soft-deleted EOX Mailboxes to Inactive EOX Mailboxes

Question

Hello.

In our organization we are prone to actioning PATI requests (Public Access to Information).

So when an employee leaves, we must retain the mailbox almost indefinitely.

Moving forward, an active retention policy that converts any un-licensed user or shared mailboxes into inactive mailboxes is in place.

 

What to do with the many soft-deleted mailboxes, is the question now.

Other than re-enable each mailbox with a license, then allowing the policy to work, is there a PowerShell script or scripts, that will convert the mailbox somehow from soft-delete to inactive?

 

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi,@Anthony-123

Thanks for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum.

When an employee leaves your organization (or goes on an extended leave of absence), you can remove their Microsoft 365 account. The employee's mailbox data is retained for 30 days after the account is removed. During this period, you can still recover the mailbox data by undeleting the account. After 30 days, the data is permanently removed.

But if a hold is applied to the mailbox prior to deleting the Microsoft 365 account, the mailbox will be converted into an inactive mailbox.

Since in-place retention is now defunct and litigation retention is an older technology, Microsoft 365 retention is recommended.

To create a retention policy you can refer to this link:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/create-retention-policies?tabs=teams-retention

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