This blog is for those who are looking for a method to restore the inactive mailboxes in Office 365. It includes information about inactive mailboxes and the manual tricks to restore them.
Generally, an Office 365 administrator makes a user mailbox inactive when its owner has left the organization, and the mailbox data needs to be saved for any time future use. The need to restore inactive mailboxes arise when
Office 365 administrators can get the list of inactive mailboxes through the Security & Compliance center in Office 365. Let us know how:
You can also get the information about inactive mailboxes by running a cmdlet in Exchange Online PowerShell. For that, you need to connect Office 365 with Windows PowerShell first. Once connected, run this command.
Once you know about the inactive mailboxes, you can try to either restore or recover it. Before that you need to learn the difference between restoring and recovering of the inactive mailboxes.
When you restore an inactive mailbox, the inactive mailbox content along with its archive mailbox content gets merged to any existing mailbox. After the restoration, the inactive mailbox is retained in the same state.
While recovering an inactive mailbox, its content is recovered to a new mailbox, after which the inactive mailbox disappears. So, you will get a new mailbox with inactive mailbox content after performing the recovery.
First of all, connect your Windows PowerShell with Exchange Online like this:
It will ask for confirmation. Type Y and press Enter.
Provide the Office 365 account credentials and click OK.
Now, we have successfully connected to Exchange Online PowerShell.
To create a variable with inactive mailbox properties, execute the following cmdlet.
At the place of bold text, enter any inactive mailbox identity received in the first step.
To recover an inactive mailbox to an existing user mailbox in Office 365, execute this command in Exchange Online PowerShell.
Add target mailbox address in place of the bolded text in the command.
Output: All the folders from the inactive mailbox are restored to the specified target mailbox instantly.
Output: A new folder, namely inactive mailbox, is created within the target mailbox folder structure (top-level), and the inactive mailbox content moved to it.
Here, provide the inactive mailbox identity in place of the bold text.
Next, run this command to restore the archive mailbox of the Inactive mailbox.
So, the restoration of inactive mailboxes could be performed through Exchange Online PowerShell with careful execution of the cmdlets. Try running cmdlets with some dummy mailboxes to check the process!