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Enable or disable single item recovery for a mailbox

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You can use the Exchange Management Shell to enable or disable single item recovery on a mailbox. In Exchange Server, single item recovery is disabled when a mailbox is created. If single item recovery is enabled, messages that are purged (hard-deleted) by the user are retained in the Recoverable Items folder of the mailbox until the deleted item retention period expires. This lets an administrator recover messages purged by the user before the deleted item retention period expires.

What do you need to know before you begin?

  • You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure or procedures. To see what permissions you need, see the "Retention and legal holds" entry in the Recipients Permissions topic.

  • You can't use the Exchange admin center (EAC) to enable or disable single item recovery.

  • In Exchange Server, the mailbox uses the deleted item retention settings of the mailbox database, by default. The deleted item retention period for a mailbox database is set to 14 days, but you can override the default by configuring this setting on a per-mailbox basis. For details, see Configure Deleted Item retention and Recoverable Items quotas.

Enable single item recovery

This example enables single item recovery for the mailbox of April Summers.

Set-Mailbox -Identity "April Summers" -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true

This example enables single item recovery for the mailbox of Pilar Pinilla and sets the number of days that deleted items are retained to 30 days.

Set-Mailbox -Identity "Pilar Pinilla" -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30

This example enables single item recovery for all user mailboxes in the organization.

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter "RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'UserMailbox'" | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true

This example enables single item recovery for all user mailboxes in the organization and sets the number of days that deleted items are retained to 30 days

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter "RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'UserMailbox'" | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see Set-Mailbox.

Disable single item recovery

You might need to disable single item recovery for a user's mailbox. For example, before you can use Search-Mailbox -DeleteContent to permanently delete content from a mailbox, you have to disable single item recovery. For more information, see Search for and delete messages in Exchange Server.

This example disables single item recovery for the mailbox of Ayla Kol.

Set-Mailbox -Identity "Ayla Kol" -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $false

How do you know this worked?

To verify that you've enabled single item recovery for a mailbox and display the value for how long deleted items will be retained (in days), run the following command.

Get-Mailbox <Name> | Format-List SingleItemRecoveryEnabled,RetainDeletedItemsFor

You can use this same command to verify that single item recovery is disabled for a mailbox.

More information

  • To learn more about single item recovery, see Recoverable Items folder in Exchange Server. To recover messages purged by the user before the deleted item retention period expires, see Recover deleted messages in a user's mailbox .

  • If a mailbox is placed on In-Place Hold or Litigation Hold, messages in the Recoverable Items folder are retained until the hold duration expires. If the hold duration is unlimited, then items are retained until the hold is removed or the hold duration is changed.