Tag: Search-Mailbox

Microsoft wants to retire the Search-Mailbox cmdlet from Exchange Online. But while the cmdlet available, it does a great job of removing mailbox items. If you get the search query right! In this example, we explain how to write a script to clear out calendar items from the mailboxes of multiple users.

Microsoft announced the retirement of legacy eDiscovery tools from Office 365. The Exchange Online in-place holds and eDiscovery tool, Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery 1, and the Search-Mailbox cmdlet are being retired. All will be gone by mid-2020. It’s a pity to see the Search-Mailbox cmdlet being removed, but time and progress make this kind of thing inevitable.

Office 365 content searches now support a hard-delete (permanent deletion) option for the purge action, but only for mailbox items. You can purge up to 10 items at a go. If you have more to purge, you just have to keep on purging until everything is gone. Or use the Search-Mailbox cmdlet, which keeps on proving its usefulness to administrators who need to remove lots of mailbox items quickly.

The Search-Mailbox cmdlet is a very powerful weapon for Exchange administrators. It has some quirks, but the Invoke-Command cmdlet helps us get around one, which is how to use a different search query for each mailbox processed in a set of mailboxes.

A question asks how to remove a bunch of emails from a shared mailbox. You can use OWA to do the job, especially with its Cleanup Mailbox option, but perhaps some administrative action is needed.

Do you need to remove some offensive or otherwise doubtful material from Teams? If the original author won’t do the right thing, the team owner or an Office 365 administrator might have to step in to do the right thing.

Search-Mailbox is a very useful cmdlet but running the cmdlet can be very dangerous as you might end up permanently removing some data that you’d prefer to keep. And in the cloud, there’s no backups…

Office 365 tenant administrators can use different ways to access user data. Shouldn’t you have a policy to govern that access?

The Search-Mailbox cmdlet is very powerful when it comes to removing items from Exchange Online mailboxes, but it can’t deal with other Office 365 content.