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SflahertyEEFlag for United States of America

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O365 user appears to have been deleted, but mailbox remains

Good afternoon experts,
I have a O365 client that appears to have had users removed from their O365 tenant when they left the company, however the users mailboxes are still in that tenant. So my question is two fold:

- 1st) Can I create a new user and associate to the orphaned mailbox somehow so I can export it down to PST and save for legal processes.
                                                                                                             or
-2nd) Can I not worry about creating a user and somehow just pull the mailbox down manually via powershell or preferably the O365 admin portal.

Thanks for your help,

S
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Vasil Michev (MVP)
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You should be able to do this, but first is best to understand why/how the mailbox are still active. Are they under any type of hold? If they simply removed the license (or the license expired), without removing the hold first, the mailbox will be left in "error" state, but the user account will still exist. If they did remove the user account, the mailbox is probably saved as "Inactive" mailbox.

In either case, you can still use the eDiscovery tab in the EAC or the SCC to run a query against the mailbox and export the results to PST file, without having to create a new user. There is no direct export-to-PST cmdlet in ExO if that's what you are after, the only means to export data is via eDiscovery.

P. S. Storing data in PST files for legal purposes is a reaaaaally bad idea :)
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ASKER

Hi Vasil,
Thanks for the reply. So I"m looking into this further and based on your comments, now I"m not sure if I'm reading it wrong.

So for active users in the tenant, there's 72 approximately. And if I go to the Exchange / Mailboxes it lists' 72.

However if I go to the Reports > Usage > Mailbox Usage- It's giving 83 records as the result. So I was assuming that there were 11 additional active mailboxes in the cloud space however no users associated with them ( i.e.  deleted somehow)

I am running some eDiscovery queries from SCC and EAC but haven't found anything yet.

So except for the Mailbox Usage report I can't find any reference to these mailboxes or user accounts, but the mailbox usage report makes it look like they're active mailboxes... is that not the case?  The 'Last Activity date' field, is that showing the last time the mailboxes were in the system or last time user accessed it?

Thank you,
S
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Tom Cieslik
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Ok thank you gentlemen,
Vasil your answer is basically what I was looking for and more applicable in this case, but Tom thank you for the link and may need that in the future.

Thanks,
S
Thanks gentlemen,
Vasil's answer little more appropriate in my case but appreciate the link Tom sent and maybe useful later.