o365 Shared Mailbox Disappears When License is removed

Question

I recently converted a user mailbox to a shared mailbox who's usage is only 2GB. When I remove the o365 license the user account remains, but the mailbox is removed. I thought shared mailboxes only needed a license if they are using more than 50GB of space.

Answer 1

Hi @rr-4098

According to this official doc: Convert a user mailbox to a shared mailbox - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

Theoretically, the user mailbox needs a license assigned to it before you convert it to a shared mailbox. After convert successfully, as long as the shared mailbox does not exceed 50GB, there is no need for a license. Then you can remove the user license of shared mailbox.

To verify, I did an experiment and it turned out that everything was fine with the shared mailbox and it wasn't removed. See as below:

Suggestion:

1. Select another user mailbox to convert to a shared email and check whether it is normal after deleting the license.
2. Check your admin account role has right permission assigned, refresh the Mailboxes lists? Go to M365 admin center home page and check if there are any alerts.
3. Connect to Exchange online powershell, use the cmdlet Get-mailbox <usermailbox> to check if the shared mailbox exist.

Hope the above can help!

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