Removing Office 365 Accounts Fast

Removing Office 365 accounts is easily done through the Admin Center. You can also restore deleted accounts within 30 days, but what if you want to remove accounts in such a way that they can’t be restored? The answer is that it can be done using a two-stage process. And if the mailboxes belonging to those accounts are on hold, they are kept as inactive mailboxes.

How to Use Microsoft 365 Compliance Search Purge Actions to Remove Exchange Online Messages

Office 365 content searches now support a hard-delete (permanent deletion) option for the purge action, but only for mailbox items. You can purge up to 10 items at a go. If you have more to purge, you just have to keep on purging until everything is gone. Or use the Search-Mailbox cmdlet, which keeps on proving its usefulness to administrators who need to remove lots of mailbox items quickly.

How to Use Search-Mailbox to Remove Items from Multiple Mailboxes

The Search-Mailbox cmdlet is a very powerful weapon for Exchange administrators. It has some quirks, but the Invoke-Command cmdlet helps us get around one, which is how to use a different search query for each mailbox processed in a set of mailboxes.

Exchange Page Patching and Native Data Protection in Office 365

Some backup vendors think that corruption can lead to data loss within Office 365. The possibility exists, but the page patching mechanism for databases incorporated into Exchange Online DAGs makes corruption a lot less likely, especially when mailboxes are protected by four database copies and Exchange applies many other techniques to ensure the consistency of the databases.

Good and Bad Marketing (Technical) Blog Posts

The internet makes it easy to find material to read about technical topics. Unfortunately, a lot of content is rubbish. In this post, we compare two recent technical articles and explain why we think one marketing post is good and the other isn’t up to scratch.

Service Domain Prefix Appears and Disappears in Exchange Online Cmdlets

A change made to fix a problem in Exchange Online introduced another problem in that service domains started to show up as prefixes in the data returned by PowerShell cmdlets. Microsoft has reversed the change, but the way things happened creates some questions.

Sending Email with PowerShell and Exchange Online

You can use the Send-MailMessage cmdlet in a PowerShell script to send mail messages via Exchange Online. And sometimes your IP address might be listed as a spammer, which is bad. All in all, authenticated client submission seems best.

Use Search-Mailbox to Remove Thousands of Items from an Exchange Online Mailbox

A question asks how to remove a bunch of emails from a shared mailbox. You can use OWA to do the job, especially with its Cleanup Mailbox option, but perhaps some administrative action is needed.

Microsoft Rolls Out Block for Calendar Forwarding

A new Exchange feature rolling out inside Office 365 allows meeting organizers to block people forwarding their meetings to all and sundry. The latest versions of OWA and Outlook 2016 click to run support the UI for the feature and blocks are built into Exchange Online and Exchange on-premises servers to stop blocked meetings sneaking through.

The Ups and Downs of the Deleting Microsoft 365 Users Wizard

Microsoft issued a new wizard to delete Office 365 accounts last week. It has the normal quota of cute graphics and some glitches to boot, but the wizard gets the job done in terms of converting a user mailbox into a shared mailbox and reassigning access to their OneDrive for Business account.