1

I had a user delete a bunch of e-mails and now we are in a position where they’re all very much needed by the company. Would these show up in eDiscovery? Is there a way to retreive e-mails that have been deleted in the last 6 months?

13 Spice ups
2

The answer is it depends.

If you don’t have a proper backup then that would depend on what your retention policies are. By default deleted items are only kept 30 days. But Office 365 lets you setup retention policies that can change that value.

What are your retention policies?

3 Spice ups
3

Not sure relatively new to the company and in the position where I am the only one doing IT. Appreciate the reply!

4

Generally, you would need to place a legal hold on the mailbox before they deleted the messages. In that case it would show deleted on the users end but still would be available in eDiscovery.

5

Go to the Compliance Admin Portal >> Data Life Cycle Managements >> Microsoft 365 >> Retention Policies

https://compliance.microsoft.com/informationgovernance?viewid=retention

2 Spice ups
6

Is this a local exchange server or O365 instance? For O365 this should be doable: Recover deleted messages in a user's mailbox in Exchange Online | Microsoft Learn

7

Hi,

What version of Exchange is your current environment, Exchange online or Exchange server?

If you know information about these messages, such as the message subject, sender, delivery time, and so on, you can retrieve these messages directly by using eDiscovery.

If the message was forwarded to another mailbox, it can be obtained from the other mailboxes.

Items that have been deleted for about six months without any retention cannot be recovered from the original mailbox.

1 Spice up
8

sincere thanks!

9

Depends on who your email provider is. Hopefully, they do have some sort of recycle bin.

Also, eDiscovery is the act of finding the information, keeping it in an unmodified form is called a legal hold. Make sure to work with your attorneys on the search criteria, to make sure what you search for and hand over is responsive.

10

Hi,
If the reply was helpful, you can mark helpful posts as the best answers so that other’s with similar question can benefit from this thread as well.