Procedure before doing HARD DELETE MSOL user to save MAILBOX

We might be aware of Litigation hold or Legal hold feature in Exchange online to avoid mailbox lost for any hard delete occurs. But consider a situation wherein Exchange administrator doesn't have "Compliance" permission in order to do MAILBOX SEARCH and recover the Inactive mailbox in the form of PST. Even if you have mailbox in PST somehow then Import using EAC or PowerShell no option in EXO.

Exchange administrator have to depend on end users / service desk to import the PST to outlook manually but if any restrictions of creating PST in your customer place also will lead to another issues / co-ordination between teams

In order to avoid all these challenges, would like to share below steps which Exchange Online administrator can perform without Complain permissions, without any dependency on end user or service desk

Step 1: Convert the user mailbox to shared mailbox, make sure the SMTP address exist else there would be mail lost

Step 2: Create one Dummy shared mailbox in cloud and move the mails from original shared mailbox to dummy one and delete the original shared mailbox, make sure you keep same mail address here to avoid mail lost

Step 3: After deletion of original shared mailbox, Inform your AD / Azure AD team to perform hard deletion of user in MSOL

Step 4: One AD team create new user in MSOL and then User become mailbox user in cloud fresh mailbox with some dummy mail address

Step 5: Change the mail address of dummy shared mailbox and assign the right mail ID to newly created mailbox to avoid mail lost

Step 6: Move the mails from dummy shared mailbox to users’ newly created fresh mailbox

Step 7: (Optional and depends on environment): Disable POP3, IMAP, set the correct MRM policy & OWA policy since the user mailbox created newly without proper user provisioning if any

Step 8: Inform end user to configure the outlook profile and all old mails will be back and issue can be set to RESOLVED.