Office 365 – Mailbox Full and Archive Policy is Somewhat Working

Problem:

A client had a mailbox that filled up to 100GB (on E3). There was an archive policy in place but that didn’t seem to be working entirely. Meaning, everything that hit the 1 year threshhold moved to the archive but older emails just weren’t working. Add to the fact that Outlook 2016 loses its archive function when you have an online archive policy made for an interesting, yet frustrating policy.

I learned 2 things from Microsoft:

  1. This problem can occur if you have over 900k items in one folder in Outlook (eg Inbox)
  2. Microsoft will tell you to wait 7 days if there’s a problem with the archive working

Solution:

I hope that this works btw. Load up powershell as administrator.

  1. Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
  2. Connect-ExchangeOnline -UserPrincipalName *user name*
  3. optional: remove-moverequest person@contoso.com
  4. New-MoveRequest -Identity person@contoso.com -ArchiveOnly
  5. Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity person@contoso.com
  6. to monitor the progress: get-moverequest “Person Name” | Get-MoveRequestStatistics

This should be run 3 – 4 times