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Hi,
I have an issue with archiving a shared mailbox created in O365 online exhange. The mailbox got full and now contains some 830.000 emails.
I need to archive emails as an admin to free up some space, older than 6 months, so far no luck.
Tried these:
Outlook windows client:
Tools->clean up old times: does not give the opportunity to select the shared mailbox in "groups" which I want to archive.
Outlook on the web: Doen't seem to have any automated method to archive. Just the single click or "hold shift" and select more method, which is obviously a no go for circa 500.000 emails, and it loads them very slowly anyway.
Creating retention policy in O365 compliance center-> no archiving option. Only offers deleting after a given time.
E-Discover and content search-> exporting to pst: The export process does not free up any space in the mailbox.
Compliance center ->archiving->Enable arhcive mailbox: Can't enable archive mailbox for a shared mailbox. This is just for individual mailboxes.
Tried to look for a powershell method but did not find any useful so far.
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
thanks
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PowerShell command can be used to check whether auto expanding is enabled, if not enable using below command. Enable-Mailbox <user mailbox> -AutoExpandingArchive
I would enabled the expanding archive as I linked above and then manually export to a pst manually from periodically from your own Outlook client assuming you have full access to the shared malbox.
You can enable archiving for a shared mailbox. You just need to apply a license to it:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/enable-autoexpanding-archiving?view=o365-worldwide
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Hi @Tóth Gábor
Yes, without a license, shared mailboxes are limited to 50 GB. To increase the size limit to 100 GB, the shared mailbox must be assigned an Exchange Online Plan 2 license. If Exchange Online Plan 1 license with an Exchange Online Archiving add-on license is assigned, this will let you enable auto-expanding archiving for additional archive storage capacity. Similarly, if you want to place a shared mailbox on litigation hold, the shared mailbox must have an Exchange Online Plan 2 license or an Exchange Online Plan 1 license with an Exchange Online Archiving add-on license. If you want to apply advanced features such as Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Advanced eDiscovery, or automatic retention policies, the shared mailbox must be licensed for those feature(s).
Details here: Storage limits
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Okay but, is there any way to archive all emails older than 6 months to a storage owned by us and not into Microsoft's cloud services? Other than manually selecting them?
Hi @Tóth Gábor
If you don't want archive your items into Microsoft's cloud services, you may check if autoarchive could meet your requirement.
Detailed introduction can be seen below:
Archive older items automatically
AutoArchive settings explained
However, please note that: “AutoArchive is an older Outlook feature that allows automatic moving of old mails to a .pst file. This means that the messages are removed from the server and are harder to find through search. If the hard drive that contains the AutoArchive.pst becomes unusable, these messages are lost.”
Different archive methods in o365 for your reference as well: About Outlook Archive, Online Archive and AutoArchive
Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.
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Thank you for replying,
This could be a solution, except one thing: Here you can't select specifically the shared mailbox. Therefore you don't know which mailbox is goning to be archived (I guess it is the primary account or every mailbox in it?). As an admin, I have multiple mailboxes in my outlook account to monitor, so I need to make the archiving proccess only on one specific (shared) mailbox.
You can use the PowerShell command to check whether auto-expanding is enabled or not, To enable use the below command. Enable-Mailbox <user mailbox> -AutoExpandingArchive