Hi all, I want to delete all inbox & sent items from a specific user and when I try deleting via storage it just freezes. Is there a way via powershell or admin portal to delete them? I am unable to increase space due to licenses.

The MS docs here provide a reference to the Powershell scripts you can run to do this. Note however that it probably isn't going to be any faster. You're deleting a lot of data and that takes a while. I suspect it is stalled trying to clean up the sent items so maybe clear the deleted items first and then the sent items later. Either way it'll take a while I suspect.

Mailbox full and freezes when deleting items

Aran Billen 516

Hi all,

I want to delete all inbox & sent items from a specific user and when I try deleting via storage it just freezes.

Screenshot 2024-04-11 at 14.51.58

Is there a way via powershell or admin portal to delete them? I am unable to increase space due to licenses.

1 answer

Michael Taylor 48,486 Reputation points

2024-04-11T14:02:42.19+00:00

The MS docs here provide a reference to the Powershell scripts you can run to do this. Note however that it probably isn't going to be any faster. You're deleting a lot of data and that takes a while. I suspect it is stalled trying to clean up the sent items so maybe clear the deleted items first and then the sent items later. Either way it'll take a while I suspect.
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Aran Billen 516 Reputation points

2024-04-12T10:02:25.39+00:00

This is what I used: New-ComplianceSearchAction -SearchName "No-reply1" -Purge -PurgeType HardDelete

Which only deleted 10 items?

Seems to have all the data in recoverableitems which is 100gb and I am struggling to find a way to delete these items

Any ideas?

Michael Taylor 48,486 Reputation points

2024-04-12T13:34:07.96+00:00

Yes the docs say that the cmdlet can only delete 10 items at a time. To delete more you have to wrap it in a loop. However, for reasons that I don't understand, the docs also say you have to remove the search action and create it again each time through the loop so you'll need to write a loop that creates the search action, removes the (10) items and then deletes the search action until there are no more items to delete.

As I mentioned, this is probably going to take just as long as doing it through the UI but you could always run it in batches or after hours so it doesn't impact things as badly.

Jake Zhang-MSFT 1,235 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-04-15T01:24:17.8166667+00:00

Just wanted to check if the answer shared below helped. If it helped, then would request you to please "Accept the answer" as it would be helpful to others in the community as well.

Aran Billen 516 Reputation points

2024-04-15T09:09:17.1466667+00:00

Hi, how do I create the loop?

Aran Billen 516 Reputation points

2024-04-15T09:10:00.8633333+00:00

also DiscoveryHolds how do I delete items in here?

Michael Taylor 48,486 Reputation points

2024-04-15T13:48:18.5066667+00:00

Loop in Powershell? Something like this perhaps.

# Docs say you can only use a single search object for each 50K mailboxes... while ($true) { # Search action (based upon docs this happens each time???) $action = New-ComplianceSearchAction ... # Get deletion results (not sure what the returned structure looks like...) $results = Get-ComplianceSearchAction -Identity $action.Identity }

Jake Zhang-MSFT 1,235 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-04-18T01:47:57.6366667+00:00

Hi @Aran Billen ,

Is there any update on this thread? If the issue has been resolved, please mark the helpful replies as answers, this will make answer searching in the forum easier and be beneficial to other community members as well. Thanks for your understanding.
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