if a corporate email account is deleted are all the messages or only some deleted forever?

Question

I work at company abcd and move on, then assume my email will be ok for a while. Turns out I need maybe a dozen emails but asked for access to all of them?? Am told no, the IT dept closed your account and can only find some emails but not all, and these are probably not emails you need. My response is how is it possible that a cloud acct is closed and there are some emails remaining kind of hit or miss? It seems to me that if the cloud acct is closed the entire batch of emails is deleted, but is it all or nothing? Many months later, how long does it take the server to delete the emails? Is it plausible to say some remain? And can they be recovered in some easy process? Thank you

Answer 1

Hi @Bradley Rogers ,

It seems to me that if the cloud acct is closed the entire batch of emails is deleted, but is it all or nothing? Many months later, how long does it take the server to delete the emails?

Normally, when a M365 user account is removed, its corresponding mailbox data would be retained for 30 days before being permanently deleted. All these assumes that the mailbox is not in any kind of hold or has been applied any retention policy before the account is removed. See this link.

Is it plausible to say some remain? And can they be recovered in some easy process?

Yes, it's plausible in some cases. If the deleted mails have already been purged from your mailbox due to the configuration of hold or policies in your previous company, it would be no longer feasible to recover them back.

One possible scenario is, a retention policy with retain and delete settings had been applied to the mailbox before the associated user account was removed, so the mailbox went into an inactive state after the user account was deleted. In this case, the retain and delete settings from the retention policy continue to apply to the inactive mailbox. This means some mails might be deleted and then purged while the others are retained because of the retention policy. More information, hopefully you can find the relevant section in the aforementioned link helpful.

With the above being said, for your current situation, personally I'd recommend continue working with the IT dept to further confirm from their side and see if the mails you need can be recovered from the mailbox. If it's no longer possible, can you recall from whom you got these mails or is there any other recipients? If yes, probably you can consider reaching out to these senders or the other recipients to get a copy of the mails you are looking for.

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