How do I reduce an O365 mailbox size?

[thecomputerguy]

Thank you @nlinecomputers @YeOldeStonecat @Sky-Knight and @callthatgirl

It's pretty clear that a retention policy is the best way to go especially since I already have them at E3. I went ahead and put the time in to learn that, it really wasn't that hard, I was just being lazy. The only issue I ran into was forcing the Managed folder assistant to start the retention policy manually using

$Mailboxes.Identity | Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

In the exchange online Powershell, I got an RPC error ... instead of puting more time into it I'll just wait out the 7 days and let it do it's thing then check in then.

Thanks all!

I need to stop being lazy.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

For many clients I setup a retention policy of "never delete"....so it will keep stuff forever.
But then setup an auto archive, with a rule of..any email older than (say..pick 3 years, or 5, or whatever)...move to archive.
Will start moving stuff within 24 hours.

 

[Sky-Knight]

It can actually take up to 8 days... usually it's 24 hours though.

 

[HCHTech]

Even if you keep everything in Office365 er, Microsoft365, you still need a backup. We've been pretty happy with Skykick's solution. We used their tools for our first on-premise to 365 migration, and it was just a natural to bundle their backup. I haven't tried any of the other solutions, so don't really know how they compare to others. It's yet another source of recurring income, which is never a bad thing.

 

[thecomputerguy]

How do you access the Archive? Does it just show up below the main data file in Outlook/OWA?

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yes, it's just another folder structure on the left in Outlook. I've actually never tried via OWA.

And yeah you do need an archival solution for all cloud services. MS has one for M365, but I still prefer to use Datto's Backupify for that. It's nice to have all that M365 stuff, email, sharepoint... everything in someone else's datacenter.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Yes, it's just another folder structure on the left in Outlook. I've actually never tried via OWA.

And yeah you do need an archival solution for all cloud services. MS has one for M365, but I still prefer to use Datto's Backupify for that. It's nice to have all that M365 stuff, email, sharepoint... everything in someone else's datacenter.

Does it just appear? Or is it something you have to configure?

 

[Sky-Knight]

Does it just appear? Or is it something you have to configure?

I just appears, mine is just under my deleted items, named Archive.