Steps to Activate / Deactivate Online Archiving in Office 365 Mailbox

Summary: This article will help you to understand how to enable or disable In-Place archive mailbox in Office 365. You can perform the steps using EAC as well as PowerShell commands. Users can easily activate or deactivate online archiving in Exchange Online after reading this article.

Microsoft Office 365 offers a wide range of features to its users which makes it one of the top choices for enterprises and businesses. One of its features is mailbox archiving. It offers additional storage space to the mailboxes. The archive mailbox storage is used to store old messages data of the users.

Before we discuss the steps to activate and deactivate archive mailbox in Office 365, we should know that Exchange Online Plan 2 offers unlimited In-Place archival storage space whereas Exchange Online Plan 1 offers limited storage space.

The In-Place archival policy is disabled by default for all mailboxes. However, users can activate In-Place archive Office 365 mailbox policy and all your old email messages will start getting stored in archive mailbox. Users can access this archival storage using Outlook Web App (In-Place Archive) and desktop Outlook (Online Archive).

How to Enable Archive Mailbox in Office 365 using EAC (Exchange Admin Center)

• Sign into Office 365 account >> Click on App Launcher >> Admin option.
• Expand Admin Centers tab in the lower left section and then select Exchange.

• Now EAC opens. Go to Recipients >> Mailboxes and select a mailbox on which you want to activate archival mailbox. Click on Enable option under In-Place archive from the right section.

Important Note: Users can also create archive mailboxes in Office 365 in bulk by selecting multiple mailboxes. It can be done using Shift and Ctrl keys to select several mailboxes at one time. Then, click on More Options on the right section and select Enable option under In-Place archive.

PowerShell Commands to Activate Archive Mailbox Office 365

At first, you must connect Exchange Online using Windows PowerShell. After that, run the following commands:

Enable-Mailbox -Identity “Lindsey Smith” –Archive

The above command enables archival for Lindsey Smith’s mailbox only. However, users can implement the following command to activate archival for all mailboxes:

Read More: Microsoft PST Collection Tool

Disable In-Place Archive Mailbox in Office 365 via Exchange Admin Center

• Sign into Office 365 account and go to Admin console.
• Click on Exchange option placed under Admin centers in the lower left navigation panel.

• In EAC, go to Recipients >> Mailboxes and then choose a particular mailbox. Now, click on Disable displayed under In-Place archive in details section.

PowerShell Command to Deactivate In-Place Archive Mailbox Office 365

The following command can help users to disable archival policy of a mailbox:

Disable-Mailbox -Identity “Lindsey Smith” -Archive

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed ways to enable or disable archive mailbox in Office 365. This blog contains two procedures to do the same. One by Exchange Admin Center and the other using PowerShell commands. Users can choose any of these methods according to their choice.