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pramod1Flag for United States of America

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office 365

user is in office 365 , heleft the company,

legal team has to have access to the mailbox.

1st the mail box is in soft delete state ad AD account of that user is deleted

can i still do restore of the mail box or AD account has to be restored first

is there any other method i can use that legal team has access to that mail box for ever

as the company doesnt want to keep the mail box active on office 365 not beyond the retention period of 90 days.

like creating pst file or some other method

can any body provide a good solution so that legal team can keep the user mailbox for ever.
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Vasil Michev (MVP)
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ASKER

can it put it on legal hold, in that case I need to work with pst or the mail box for putting in legal hold, do I need to have AD account
Did it initially have a hold on it?  Even though it was soft deleted if it had a hold on it you can pull the whole mailbox down to a .pst.
1.  Open your Exchange Admin Center
2.  Go to Compliance Management>In-Place EDiscovery & hold...Click the + and make a name for this pull
3   Specify mailbox to Search, click the + and see if it finds your mailbox by displayname
4.  Pull all content
5.  Save all to a .pst, depending on the size of the mailbox this may take some time to pull all down.
* Try to use either internet Explorer or Edge when pulling the .pst from EDiscovery, Google Chrome gives errors at times.


*Depending on how long ago it was soft-deleted if you don't find it in Ediscovery you may be able to bring it back with Undo-SoftDeletedMailbox leveraging powershell
ref link:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/mailboxes/undo-softdeletedmailbox?view=exchange-ps
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ASKER

so u mean if mail box is on hold and user account is deleted in AD , we can still have access to the mail box
yes
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ASKER

so there is no other way to access the mailbox than the option of .pst?
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ASKER

so the legal mailbox will be accessed only as .pst file only?
Look at Vasil's link .  You can restore the contents of the mailbox to another user's mailbox if need be.  If this is for the legal department I would pull down the .pst  That way they open it do their queries and so forth and then close  it when they don't need it.
Did you bother to even look at the article I linked? You do not have to deal with PSTs, that's a very bad idea in general.

Put the mailbox on hold, then delete the AD user. The mailbox will become Inactive, and all data in it will be stored in O365 until the hold is removed. You can still access the data via eDiscovery, even export it if needed. And the best part is that it's free - once the user is removed, no license is consumed anymore.