Can we grant acces to a Mailbox which is in Softdelete?

Question

I would like to ask a question in order to possibly work more effectively in EXO.

Our current situation: We have a local AD which is synchronised with the AAD. After sync, users are assigned everything they need per group.

In the EXO environment, each user has a 7-year retention period for each mail.

In parallel, an archive is maintained daily by a 3rd party provider.

This archive is maintained by the provider and automatically adds new users and books the archiv licences for them.

Our problem now is when we have to remove a user. After deleting user the mailbox goes into soft delete state for 30 days. In order to still have access to the mailbox, a backup is made from the archive to a new shared mailbox. The new shared mailbox can now be shared with other people who need access to the emails.

However, as we now have a new shared mailbox, a new licence is assigned in Archiving and the shared mailbox is archived again.

Our mailboxes are retrieved from the archive provider via EWS.

The question: Is there any way we can make our user removal process more efficient so that we don't end up with 2 archived mailboxes?

Answer 1

According to Microsoft's official documentation, if we want to keep to access to the mailbox of “remove user” , it is recommended to convert it to shared mailbox as you have done. You can refer to this URL: Step 4 - Forward a former employee's email to another employee or convert to a shared mailbox - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

But as you mentioned, you have a 3rd party provider to automatically enable archive mailbox for the new users, please understand that we didn’t know much about the 3rd party provider, we cannot provider any useful info about it. However based on my personal experience, you could try to change its work mode that automatically enable archive mailbox for the new users except shared mailbox.