My mailbox in question has 713,198 in the Recoverable items and 654,420 in the Purges as of today. No real reply yet, just and update that they are working to replicate my issue. We turned that off and then tried to follow this:īut no luck. In my case we had a 'service' mailbox that did have a retention policy applied that I think was keeping everything. Hi James - I have an open case with MS O365 support for what I think is the same thing. So to cut a long story short, what is the best way to purge the Recoverable Items (dumpster) and create some space? Do I need to use Search-Mailbox with -DeleteContent? Reading up on this, this is apparently due to Single Item Recovery being enabled with the default 14 day limit - I have now disabled Single Item Recovery on this mailbox and set the limit to 0 - but it seems that this setting does not affect items that are already in Recoverable Items - i.e.

Using the Recovered Items feature in Outlook on a couple of messages shows that the messages get moved from the Deleted sub folder in Recoverable Items into the Purges folder, but they are not removed from Recoverable Items.

The results show that the Recoverable Items folder has reached the hard quota of 30GB, which explains why nothing can be deleted from the mailbox. The user ran the 'Empty Junk Folder' option in Outlook overnight and this removed a large chunk and then no more could be deleted (error message in Outlook).Īt this point I became involved and first ran Get-MailboxFolderStatistics on Recoverable Items (dumpster).

One of my users received around 1.5million unwanted emails (this is a long story that I won't go in to, but it was basically user error) and the vast majority have gone into the Junk Folder.

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