How to delete emails from a user's mailbox when it doesn't allow you to do it manually? (Purge?)

Question

Hi again, I am confronted with a user whose mailbox is full. There is no deleting manually the emails or the attached files. Here the Folder statistics :

Clearly the issue is with the DiscoveryHolds and the SearchDiscoveryHoldsUnindexedItemFolder, however I don't know how to purge these folder atm.

Please advise.

Answer 1

You cannot purge items that are on hold, that's the idea behind the hold feature. The only way would be to remove the hold(s) first, as detailed in this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/ediscovery-delete-items-in-the-recoverable-items-folder-of-mailboxes-on-hold?view=o365-worldwide

Of course, make sure that you are actually allowed to remove the hold first, you don't want to end up in a scenario where a bunch of item required by a litigation were removed. If the idea is to free up some space, a faster approach might be to do a "cleanup", by running the following cmdlet:

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant user@domain.com -HoldCleanup

This will prompt the MFA to potentially clean up duplicate items that are on hold, without impacting the overall hold status.