Exchange has traditionally offered several methods by which to delete content
from a mailbox as an administrator. Search-Mailbox is good, but runs
synchronously and requires that PowerShell be running, connected to Exchange
Online for the duration. Compliance Searches can work too, but in my experience,
they’re slow and unreliable.
The most reliable method I’ve found so far is to create a retention policy with a one-day deletion tag, then force the Managed Folder Assistant to process the mailbox. This looks like the following:
Create a retention tag
This creates a tag called 1 Day Delete which deletes items more than 1 day old
New-RetentionPolicyTag -Name "1 Day Delete" -AgeLimitForRetention (New-TimeSpan -Days 1) -RetentionAction DeleteAndAllowRecovery -Type "All"
Create a retention policy and assign the 1 Day Delete Tag
This creates a policy called Mailbox Purge Policy and assigns the
1 Day Delete tag to it.
New-RetentionPolicy -Name "Mailbox Purge Policy" -RetentionPolicyTagLinks "1 Day Delete"
Assign the retention policy to the mailboxes to be purged
Let’s assign the Mailbox Purge Policy policy to the mailboxes to be cleared.
In this case, it’s AdeleV and KimA.
$Mailboxes = @(
"AdeleV",
"KimA"
)
$Mailboxes | Set-Mailbox -RetentionPolicy "Mailbox Purge Policy"
After the policy is applied, the Managed Folder Assistant should be triggered to force an immediate application of the policy. Beware that AD replication within Office 365 may mean that the Retention Policy takes around half an hour to apply, after which point the following can be run:
$Mailboxes | ForEach-Object { Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity $_ }
Running this command will trigger the Managed Folder Assistant to run across the mailboxes in question, thus deleting the content.
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