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How To Archive Former Employees’ Mailboxes In Office 365: Step-By-Step Guide

how to archive former employees' mailboxes in Office 365
Maarten ~ Modified: May 9th, 2024 ~ Microsoft Office 365 ~ 8 Minutes Reading

How to archive former employees’ mailboxes in Office 365? curious to know the answer. so this article is for you. When an employee leaves the organization their mailbox and data are preserved for further use. It is beneficial to archive former employees’ mailboxes in Office 365 to keep important data secure. To ensure email data is safe and maintain compliance organizations use different holds techniques. In this article, we are dealing with how to archive former employee’s mailboxes in Office 365.

The employee who leaves the organization has huge data with them related to the company. Therefore, it is crucial to secure the organizational data for further use by higher authorities. Moreover, it is challenging to manage a Microsoft Office 365 account of the formal employees. That is why, the organization terminated the license after the data migration or backup. There are several reasons for the same like the cost of the license security and so on.

Table Of Contents

Before directly jumping into how to archive former employees’ mailboxes in Office 365 it is important to know about Former employees and the Reason for archiving former employee’s mailboxes in Office 365.

The employees who were part of the organization earlier are known as former employees. When the former employees leave the organization the admin can take the following actions.

  • Deactivate the account
  • Retention of Data and  Archiving 
  • Forward the emails and auto-replies
  • Legal policy consideration 

Why Do The Mailboxes Of Former Employees Have To Be Archived In Office 365?

There are several reasons these you need to archive old users’ mailboxes in Office 365. These include the following practices mentioned below.

  • Compliances – According to the rules, many companies can comply with the mailbox of old users to avoid legal consequences.
  • For Relevant Knowledge – If you want to look at the historical information and the state of the project. You need to check the mailbox of the formal employee to transfer the project to another employee. 
  • To Prevent Data Loss – If the admin deletes a license without proper archiving can cause data loss permanently. This can cause problems when the data is important.
  • References From The Data – The new team members or employees can take the reference from the old data. If you are new you can easily go with the work through the documentation, codes, and other information of the project.
  • Legal Disputes – If the former employee is in legal disputes the mailbox is the critical evidence. So proper archiving is required to ensure the availability of the evidence present in the mailbox.

How To Archive Former Employee’s Mailboxes In Office 365

In this section, we will discuss the methods by which you can archive former employee’s mailboxes in Office 365.

Method 1. Archive Former Employee’s Mailboxes By Converting To Shared Mailbox

It allows multiple users to access the mailbox rather than individual. All the data of the mailbox are retained in a shared mailbox. You can only do this if the data is sharable to the group and does not contain any secret information.

To convert the old- user’s mailbox to a shared mailbox you need to follow the steps mentioned.

Step 1. Firstly you need to Restore the User’s Account.
Step 2. Make sure to assign a Microsoft 365 license to the account.
Step 3. Reset the password for the account.
Step 4. You need to wait for 20-30 minutes for recreation of the mailbox.
Step 5. After re-reaction of the mailbox remove the license from the user mailbox.

Don’t delete the old mailbox. through these steps your shared mailbox is created now you can add members to it.

Read More: Office 365 Shared Mailbox Vs Inactive Mailbox

Method 2. Make Use Of The Exchange Admin Center To Archive Former Employee’s Mailboxes To Shared Mailboxes

In this method, to convert the old- user’s mailbox to a shared mailbox you must need an Exchange Online Plan 2 license. This plan of Microsoft 365 contains  In-Place Hold or Litigation Hold like features within it.

You need to follow the steps mentioned.

Step 1. First Sign in with the Admin credential or Exchange admin account of Office365.
Step 2. From the recipients, you need to select Mailboxes and find the mailbox from the list of mailboxes to whom you want to convert.
Step 3. Press Right-click on the mailbox with the mouse.
Step 4. Select Convert to a shared mailbox.
Step 5. Confirm and Select Convert.

After converting you need to manage the permission needed to the shared mailbox.

Note: You can only perform this when the license of the old user is in an active state. If you are creating the Shared mailbox and adding users to it. You are the global admin of the mailbox.

Method 3. Forward The Email To The New Team Member 

If the former employee’s project is still running and the new employee is added in place. Here, you need to forward the emails of the old user to the current user’s mailbox.

Here is the way to do so.

Step 1. Go to the admin center and then Users 
Step 2. Select Active users.
Step 3. Select the name of the old employee from the list.
Step 4. Go to the Email Forwarding option & pick the option Manage email forwarding.
Step 5. Enable the option to Forward all emails sent to this mailbox.
Step 6. Enter the current user email address in the Forwarding address box,
Step 7. Press the Save button.

Read More: How To Create A No-Reply Mailbox In Microsoft 365 

Method 4. Make The Former Employees’ Mailbox Inactive

In this method you need to purchase the specific license to inactive the former employees’ mailbox. As the Exchange Online Archiving add-on license consists of different holds features in it.

You need to place a Litigation hold or any hold according to your requirement. Then Convert the mailbox into the inactive mailbox. Follow the steps mentioned below.

Step 1. Open and log in to the Exchange admin center of Microsoft Office 365. 
Step 2. Goto the former employees’ mailbox you need to make Inactive.
Step 3. Applying the retention policy and placing the mailbox on hold.
Step 4. Wait until the retention policy is applied and mention the time also till your retention policy is applicable.
Step 5. Go through with the hold is applied successfully.

Now you can delete the former employee’s mailbox or account from the Microsoft admin center. Let’s Move to the next method.

Method 5. Exporting The Former Employees’ Mailbox To Pst File For Archiving

In this method, You need to create a local copy of the Former employees’ mailbox data. You can export data in a PST file and import it to another format.

Let’s look at the steps to export the Former employees’ mailbox data to the PST file.

Step 1. You need to Add the former employee’s email address to your version of Outlook on the Desktop.
Step 2. Open the Outlook 365 & click the File tab 
Step 3. Select Open & Export and go to Import/Export.
Step 4. Click on the option to Export a file 
Step 5. Click Next and select Outlook data file then select the mailbox.
Step 6. Click on the Next button and address the location to save the file in PST format.

Method 6. Make Use Of Automated Software To Migrate Former Employees’ Mailboxes

Since all the methods are time-consuming and there is no such solution that can migrate the data to the new account, from one source email address to another destination email. Therefore you need to make use of any automated tool present in the market one of the great tools for migration is the Migrator Wizard Office 365 Migration Tool for smooth and efficient data migration without any delay. You can download & purchase it from the button given below.

Download Now Purchase Now

Hope these methods are beneficial for the user who has a query about how to archive former employee’s mailboxes in Office 365.

Some best practices you need to follow when thinking about how to archive former employees’ mailboxes in Office 365.

Best Practices

  • Not to delete the mailbox or license of the employee who is leaving the organization.
  • Follow the policy of the organization for data retention. It determines how long to keep the data.
  • Make use of features like In-Place eDiscovery and Hold to archive mailboxes before deleting.
  • Converting mailboxes to shared mailboxes also comes under the best practices.
  • Make use of any reliable tool.

To activate the licence subscription from Microsoft 365 is needed which is cost effective.

Read More: Office 365 Mailbox Types

Bring It All Together

Data is precious for everyone whether it is small organization or big. Employees come and go in the organization but it is the responsibility of the admin to manage the data. In this blog, we have covered the topic of how to archive former employees’ mailboxes in Office 365. Hope now you have a picture clear idea by following the method mentioned above.