Exchange online user mailbox full

Question

Hi,

I have experience a user mailbox full issue.

When mailbox reach, the user keep delete and clean up delete item on OWA or outlook client.

When clean up delete item , the delete item can't be delete normally and delete item will comeback after delete.

It is very strange , user can't cleanup the mailbox.

I've checked the mailbox Litigation Holds is off and online archive is on.

The recovery delete item should purged permanently from the Recoverable Items folder on a first in, first out basis when the Recoverable Items warning quota is exceeded, but it doesn't. Checked the recovery delete item limited is 30GB

What should I do when user mailbox reach full ? User should clean up the recoverable item first and archive or delete the unused mail?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Check for recoverable items quota size "dumpster":

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -Identity "user name" -FolderScope RecoverableItems | Format-List  
 

Deletes items in RecoverableItemsFolder in case the user can't empty deleted items.

Search-mailbox -identity "user" -SearchDumpsterOnly -DeleteContent  
 

To increase the Quota, you can use:

Set-Mailbox -Identity “mailboxalias” -RecoverableItemsQuota 20Gb -RecoverableItemsWarningQuota 15Gb

Answer 2

@Mark TT

When clean up delete item , the delete item can't be delete normally and delete item will comeback after delete.

It looks like the Deletions folder in the Recoverable Items folder has exceeded the message count limit:

About Recoverable Items folder, there also exists a limitation about the maximum number of messages per folder:

What should I do when user mailbox reach full ? User should clean up the recoverable item first and archive or delete the unused mail?

You could try to clean the recoverable Items folder for this user first, then try to delete emails from this mailbox. If those emails still need to be used, you could move them to the archive mailbox. Please note, there also exists a limitation about archive mailbox.

If you still cannot delete emails after cleaning up the recoverable Items folder, you could open an Office 365 service request to let Microsoft help you check from the backend.

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Answer 3

Hello, marktt, I can share two ways of increasing the mailbox size to its maximum:

• Change the Exchange Online Plan 2 license which will increase the storage limit to 100 GB from 50 GB.
• You can switch on the Exchange Online Archiving. It depends on your license which will give you +50 GB or even almost unlimited space with the auto-expanding archiving.

The next recommendation from me is to get more information on how to backup MO365 accounts with a fast and solid backup for Microsoft 365, as ransomware issues and system glitches are things that can't be predicted, but you can prepare for recovery right now.