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An exception "Mailbox 'x' doesn't have a valid license" occurs while trying to access inactive soft deleted mailboxes.
A mailbox with an M365 retention policy (Purview) was deleted and converted to an inactive mailbox. It's verified that the mailbox has IsSoftDeleted and IsInactiveMailbox properties set to true in PowerShell.
However, when creating the ExchangeServiceWrapper to access the content, an internal server error arises: "The operation failed. Mailbox 'xx' doesn't have a valid license."
What could be the reason for this error? It is understood that the license gets revoked when a user is deleted, so why is there an invalid license error?
You cannot access Inactive mailboxes programmatically, the only way would be via eDiscovery/Content search. Or recover/restore the inactive mailbox first: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/restore-an-inactive-mailbox
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Hello, @Shreyas Gupta,
Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A platform!
Based on your description, you encountered a "Mailbox 'x' doesn't have a valid license" error while trying to access inactive soft deleted mailboxes through PowerShell.
Vasil Michev is right. Inactive mailboxes cannot be accessed programmatically. I am just going to provide some instructions and relevant links.
1. eDiscovery/Content Search
To perform eDiscovery searches, first assign the necessary eDiscovery permissions in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Create an eDiscovery case, add members, and define your search criteria. Run the search, preview the results, and export them in the desired format, such as PST or CSV.
Instruction links:
a. Get started with eDiscovery (Standard) | Microsoft Learn
b. Search for content in an eDiscovery (Standard) case | Microsoft Learn
c. Keyword queries and search conditions for eDiscovery | Microsoft Learn
2. Restoring Inactive Mailboxes
To restore an inactive mailbox, connect to Exchange Online PowerShell and identify the inactive mailbox. Use the New-MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet to restore the mailbox to an existing one. Monitor the restore request's status and complete it once done. This allows you to temporarily access the mailbox content directly.
For more detailed information, you can refer to the official Microsoft documentation on restoring inactive mailboxes.
Should you need more help on this, you can feel free to post back.
If the answer is helpful, please click on “Accept answer” as it could help other members of the Microsoft Q&A community who have similar questions and are looking for solutions.
Thank you for your support and understanding.
Best Wishes,
Alex Zhang
My requirement is to not recover or search mailbox, but retrieve data from soft deleted inactive mailboxes while still in soft deleted state.
As per my understanding, if a mailbox which does not have retention policy is deleted, it gets disconnected and isn't accessible. But if any retention policy is applied it moves to inactive state. These mailboxes are accessible to retrieve data via EWS Managed API. I have a working setup for this.
Programmatically, I get mailbox via powershell "Get-Mailbox -SoftDeletedMailboxes" cmlet which I'm able to do successfully. Once I'm able to fetch mailbox, I use Exchange Web Services(EWS) Managed API to establish the connection and fetch root folder using ExchangeService object with autodiscovery url and mailbox impersonation.
I'm able to fetch root folder for inactive soft deleted mailboxes and all its content in normal cases but seeing issue for one of the tenant where I'm getting 'Mailbox "x" doesn't have a valid license' exception from EWS.
This is not the expected behavior. Being accessible via EWS means data in inactive mailboxes can also be exposed via some email clients, which goes against the definition of an inactive mailbox. That said, I did a quick test and I can indeed enumerate items in a long-removed Inactive mailbox via EWS. I would suggest you open a support case and report this behavior, as it's likely a bug. In the meantime I will ping few folks to try and get some clarity on this as well.