Unable to empty Local Failures folder in user mailbox.

Question

Unable to empty Local Failures folder in user mailbox.

Joe Grover 566

I have a user who received a notification that his mailbox was approaching the 100GB limit for his E3 license. This seemed to be excessive for this user, and after looking into things I saw that almost half of the used space was in the Local Failures folder.

This folder had about 1300 items in it totaling 49.5GB. I switched to the Folders view in Legacy Outlook and almost all of the items were files with large file attachments (37-40MB).

He indicated he did not need them and we tried to empty the folder. It removed almost half of the items, but there are still 669 items totally 25.75GB there. I'm unable to do anything with these items.

Clicking Empty in the Outlook on the Web storage does not remove them, nor does selecting them in Legacy Outlook and trying to delete them from there. There's no error, the items just don't disappear.

Is there a better way to clear this out (either from local Outlook or on the server)?

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Answer 1

Vasil Michev 119.5K MVP Volunteer Moderator

Did you check the size/quota of the Recoverable Items subtree? If it's full, you will be unable to delete any additional messages. Get-MailboxFolderStatistics or Get-MailboxStatistics can give you the size, and you can use the steps in this article for a cleanup: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/recoverable-items-folder/clean-up-deleted-items

Joe Grover 566 Reputation points

2024-11-26T19:22:05.0533333+00:00

Woof. It looks like that will only delete 10 items at a time, so I'd need to run that almost 70 times.

However, it didn't seem to work for me. I got the folder ID of the user's /RecoverableItems, then used the new Microsoft Purview center to create a content search of his mailbox with keyword folderid:<that folder id> but the search came up with nothing--despite the mailbox statistics indicating that there are 26,563 items in there totaling 30.03 GB.
Vasil Michev 119.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2024-11-26T20:32:21.12+00:00

Tony has a sample script that can automate the process a bit here: https://practical365.com/compliance-search-purge/

It also includes a function to process RecoverableItems.
Anonymous

2024-11-27T03:21:17.7933333+00:00

Hi, @Joe Grover

As you said, only 10 items will be deleted this time, so you may need to run the command multiple times. This is because the ability to search and delete messages is intended as an incident response tool, so this restriction helps ensure that messages are quickly deleted from the mailbox. This feature is not recommended for cleaning up user mailboxes.

Have you tried the sample script recommended by Vasil?

What Vasil says makes sense, you need to first check if the recoverable items have reached the limit. You can clear recoverable items.

If you think it's safe, you can use Ctrl+A in the Local Failures folder to select all the messages and press Delete to delete them.

Also, you can try to delete messages using this method:

Preview the results of an eDiscovery search | Microsoft Learn

Search for and delete email messages in your organization | Microsoft Learn

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Anonymous

2024-12-02T09:04:46.5933333+00:00

Hi, @Joe Grover

Any updates so far? If you have solved your problem, could you share with us? Maybe it will help more people with similar problems. Don't forget to mark it as answer, this will be easy for other community members to find the useful one.
Anonymous

2024-12-06T09:14:07.8633333+00:00

Just circling back to check to see how things are going on with this thread. Should you need more help on this, you can feel free to post back.

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Unable to empty Local Failures folder in user mailbox.

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