I've got a client with over 150,000 emails piling up in the Deleted Items of their Online Archive for a shared mailbox. The catch is, they can only delete emails older than a few years. I've tried running a retention policy, but apparently, those can take up to two weeks to kick in. On top of that, Outlook is crashing, probably due to the sheer volume of emails. They're also not keen on getting an Exchange 2 License. Is there any way to speed things up, like using PowerShell? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
3 Answers
Honestly, if this user can't manage their emails properly, maybe it's time to let someone higher up deal with the license costs. Implementing a solid retention policy could help, like deleting trash after 30 days and the sync issues folder after 15. If you're feeling extra bold, you could set up delegate access and do some heavy-duty cleanup yourself. Just search for and delete anything irrelevant—like newsletters or promotional content. It's a corporate account anyway, so you have some leeway here!
A simple but effective method is to get access to the shared mailbox, switch to the web version of Outlook, and then head to settings under storage. From there, you can delete all deleted items older than a year—this should free up quite a bit of space quickly.
You might want to try running the cmdlet `Start-ManagedFolderAssistant`. This can help expedite the process. It usually gets retention labels to apply within hours instead of days after you set them. Consider using the command like this: `Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -identity [email protected] -AggMailboxCleanup`. Give it a go and see if it helps!
I tried running that command, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. It might just be the massive amount of data at play. I found another cmdlet for purging emails under Compliance-Search that I might explore, but I'm pretty inexperienced with PowerShell.
It’s funny how sometimes, the messy solutions are the most effective ones. I’ve had plenty of moments where I just ended up cleaning up a client's mess myself, since they refuse to handle it!