What is a deleted mailbox in Exchange server?
Organizations all over the world use the Exchange server for email and communication. A deleted mailbox is one that no longer exists on an Exchange server and has been deleted due to inactivity. An IT administrator can delete a user mailbox when an employee leaves an organization or when it is no longer used. If you want to restore such a mailbox, you must connect it to a temporary user account. However, restoring deleted mailboxes becomes necessary when no prior backup of the deleted mailbox is taken and you must recover certain emails or mail data for compliance purposes. Under normal circumstances, deleted mailboxes are retained in the Exchange database for 30 days before being purged. Furthermore, you can only recover a deleted mailbox if the retention period has not yet expired. If the retention period has expired, you must use third-party software to recover the mailboxes from an Exchange database backup snapshot. In this article, we will look at how to recover deleted mailboxes as well as mail items from Exchange 2019, 2016, 2013 and 2010.
How to change the retention period of deleted mailboxes in Exchange?
By default, Exchange online retains deleted emails and mail items for 14 days and deleted mailboxes for 30 days, which can be configured and extended from the Exchange admin center (EAC). Let's take a look at the step-by-step instructions for changing the retention period.