Emails not Purging Recoverable Deleted Items after Disabling Litigation Hold

Background

Recently, Meeting invites sent to a user were bouncing. After further analysis saw that issue was related to “Recoverable Items” reaching 100 GB.

As you know Microsoft allows 100 GB in Recoverable Items, This mailbox was on litigation hold for long time, that’s why had his Recoverable full over the time. This user was part of any legal proceedings hence litigation hold can be disabled. I disabled Litigation Hold for the user but that still didn’t clear Recoverable Items folder after several days.

Further research revealed that Microsoft has a additional feature which stops deletion from Litigation Hold Mailboxes for 30 Days.

So if you want to purge immediately, you should disable Litigation Hold and then purge the item.

Identify Problem

Use below commands to find out if Litigation Hold is the problem :

• This command shows Size of Folder RecoverableItems and it’s nested folders. It shows that Purges has 100 GB size.

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics verifysetting -FolderScope RecoverableItems  | ft Name,foldersize

Next, We find out if LitigationHoldEnabled is True

Get-Mailbox verify* |fl LitigationHoldEnabled

Fix

I disabled LitigationHold with LitigationHoldEnabled to False

Set-Mailbox VerifySetting -LitigationHoldEnabled $false

Get-Mailbox verify* |fl LitigationHoldEnabled

Found that DelayHoldApplied,DelayReleaseHoldApplied are set to True, These values delay deletion of emails from LitigationHoldEnabled Mailoxes.

Get-Mailbox verifysetting | FL DelayHoldApplied,DelayReleaseHoldApplied

Disabled DelayHoldApplied & DelayReleaseHoldApplied for the user.

Set-Mailbox VerifySetting -RemoveDelayHoldApplied
Set-Mailbox VerifySetting -RemoveDelayReleaseHoldApplied

Get-Mailbox verifysetting | FL DelayHoldApplied,DelayReleaseHoldApplied

Ran ManagedFolderAssistant against mailboxes to force MRM to kick in and delete content, Once I checked after few hours, emails started to purge.

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity verifysetting

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics verifysetting -FolderScope RecoverableItems | ft Name,foldersize

Refer this article for more info :

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/delete-items-in-the-recoverable-items-folder-of-mailboxes-on-hold?view=o365-worldwide#step-4-remove-the-delay-hold-from-the-mailbox

Thanks for reading !