Can I restore an email that has been deleted without the user being notified?

Question

I need to look at the emails of an 365 account that has been deleted as there may be details on there that can my company needs to access. I do not want the user to be notified that their account has been reactivated (it was only deleted 3 days ago so is within the 30 days of being able to restore) as they are no longer an employee. When the account is reactivated would the personal email address that was used when the account was first set up to send login details to be sent an email from Microsoft to notify the address is now active again? Is there a way of stopping this from happening. Or is there a way of looking at this particular users emails without reactivating the email address?

Thanks

Answer 1

The user wont be notified. There is no reason to activate the account though, just give yourself full access to the mailbox and open it via OWA, Outlook or just access via your own Outlook instance...

Answer 2

Hi @Sarah Jones

When the account is reactivated would the personal email address that was used when the account was first set up to send login details to be sent an email from Microsoft to notify the address is now active again?

By "the personal email address", are you referring to the email address specified to send the login account and password information when first creating the account?

If this is the case, based on my test in my demo tenant, no, this email address won't receive any notification after you restore the account, unless you deliberately choose to send login details to this email address when restoring the account. Below are the steps of my test:

1. A new user test01 was created and the login details were sent to the personal email address I specified as shown in the image above.
2. Verified test01 can use the login details to change the temporary password and then access the mailbox to send and receive messages.
3. Then I deleted test01 via Microsoft 365 admin center and verified test01 can no longer access the mailbox.
   
4. After that, I tried to restore test01's account in the Microsoft 365 admin center:
   
   
   As we can see in the screenshot, here we can choose not to send the login details or specify a different email address. I choosed to use an administrator's email addres and completed the restore process. After assinging the license and waiting for a few minutes, I was able to access test01's mailbox with the new credentials. During the entire restore procedure, the original personal email address was not involved at all so it did't receive any notification.

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