Outlook-Email-Archiving

If your Office 365 mailbox is getting close to 50 GB and you’re considering enabling archive mailbox, read on. When you turn on archiving, technically called “In-Place Archiving,” it creates another mailbox in the user’s Outlook with its own calendar. And the most commonly cited assistance page does not really tell you about the split unless you thoroughly read it and click on the section entitled “Instructions for end users” towards to end. To make matters worse, all emails and calendar items that are older than two years are automatically moved from the main mailbox into the online archive mailbox. Yes, two years is the default. There’s no alert during the enablement, either. Why they thought two years is enough as default is beyond me. If you realize you made a mistake, there is no revert button or a straightforward process to undo it. Pretty unbelievable. And even if you change the archiving duration to, say, 5 years or 7 years, it will not revert any of the changes. It applies to all calendar items and emails from the point archiving was turned on. Users who are used to checking their calendars and emails on their phones now have to take the extra step of looking at what is effectively another mailbox. And sometimes, the Outlook mobile app does not even show the online archive at all. (I hear the feature to show online archive was added only last year.) So now, you have a split mailbox, with emails and calendars in two different places and no quick way of going back. But you can go back. The following is a somewhat manual process, but it will work.