Unlimited Exchange Online Archiving is no longer Unlimited

TLDR: Microsoft has added size restrictions to Unlimited Archiving (aka Auto-Expanding Archiving). The change will take effect beginning November 1, 2021. Once this limit takes effect, users will not be able to extend their online archives beyond 1.5TB.

Upcoming Changes to Auto-Expanding Archive

MC288051 · Published 29 Sept 2021 · Last updated 30 Sept 2021

 

Message Summary

Updated September 30, 2021: We have updated the content below for additional clarity. Thank you for your patience.

We will be removing the word ‘Unlimited’ from our service description and related public documentation for the auto-expanding archiving feature, and instituting a 1.5TB limit for archive mailboxes. This limit is not configurable.

 

Key points

• Timing: This change will take effect beginning November 1, 2021 and is applicable to all environments.
• Roll-out: tenant level
• Action: review and assess

 

How this will affect your organization

Once this limit takes effect, your users will not be able to extend their online archives beyond 1.5TB. As currently noted in our documentation, auto-expanding archive is only supported for mailboxes used for individual users or shared mailboxes with a growth rate that does not exceed 1 GB per day. Using journaling, transport rules, or auto-forwarding rules to copy messages to Exchange Online Archiving for the purposes of archiving is not permitted. A user's archive mailbox is intended for just that user. Microsoft reserves the right to deny auto-expanding archiving in instances where a user's archive mailbox is used to store archive data for other users or in other cases of inappropriate use.

If you have previously worked with Microsoft Support to provide exceptions for existing archives exceeding 1.5TB, those specific archives will not be affected by this change. You will not, however, be able to create any new archives that exceed 1.5TB.

 

What you need to do to prepare

You should check the size of archives in your organization if you are concerned that they might be close to the limit and consider deleting some of the content if you intend to continue adding to the archive. You can use Get-MailboxFolderStatistics to view archive mailbox size.

Analyze Mailbox Items Class or Type

The purpose of this script is to go through every single item in a mailbox and produce a report listing the class (or type) of each item and how many items of each class were found in the mailbox:

Processed 52 folders and 19163 items.

Name Value
---- -----
IPM.Appointment                          194
IPM.Appointment.ReadiManagerMeeting      2
IPM.Contact                              164
IPM.Note                                 16911
IPM.Note.Exchange.ActiveSync.MailboxLog  2
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation          1616
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation.Voice    67
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Missed                2
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Canceled            3
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request             43
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.Neg            3
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.Pos            20
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.Tent           2
IPM.Sharing                              120
IPM.StickyNote                           14

I created this script to have an idea of how items had been archived by EnterpriseVault across the users’ mailboxes (IPM.NOTE.EnterpriseVault.Shortcut class). The script reports on all item classes, but it can easily be changed to only look for a particular class, such as EV stubs for example.

To download the complete final script, please head on to the TechNet Script Gallery.

Archive Mailbox Statistics

Although Personal Archives in Exchange 2010 are often in cheaper storage than “normal” mailboxes, we still need to keep an eye on them to check how archives are growing and how (if!) users are using it.

Here’s a simple script to get some statistics regarding all the archive mailboxes in your environment:

$mbcombCollection = @()

$archiveMbxs = Get-Mailbox -Archive -ResultSize Unlimited | Select Identity, ArchiveWarningQuota, ArchiveQuota
ForEach ($mbx in $archiveMbxs)
{
 $mbxStats = Get-MailboxStatistics $mbx.Identity -Archive | Select DisplayName, StorageLimitStatus, TotalItemSize, TotalDeletedItemSize, ItemCount, DeletedItemCount, Database

 $mbcomb = "" | Select "Display Name", StorageLimitStatus, "TotalItemSize (MB)", "TotalDeletedItemSize (MB)", ItemCount, DeletedItemCount, Database, "ArchiveWarningQuota (GB)", "ArchiveQuota (GB)"

 $mbcomb."Display Name" = $mbxStats.DisplayName
 $mbcomb.StorageLimitStatus = $mbxStats.StorageLimitStatus
 $mbcomb."TotalItemSize (MB)" = [math]::round($mbxStats.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB(), 2)
 $mbcomb."TotalDeletedItemSize (MB)" = [math]::round($mbxStats.TotalDeletedItemSize.Value.ToMB(), 2)
 $mbcomb.ItemCount = $mbxStats.ItemCount
 $mbcomb.DeletedItemCount = $mbxStats.DeletedItemCount
 $mbcomb.Database = $mbxStats.Database
 $mbcomb."ArchiveWarningQuota (GB)" = $mbx.ArchiveWarningQuota.Value.ToGB()
 $mbcomb."ArchiveQuota (GB)" = $mbx.ArchiveWarningQuota.Value.ToGB()

 $mbcombCollection += $mbcomb
}

#$mbcombCollection
$mbcombCollection | Export-Csv D:\Scripts\Reports\"ArchiveStats_$(Get-Date -f 'yyyyMMdd').csv" -NoType

Hope this helps!

Outlook 2007 Update for Exchange 2010 Personal Archive Support

I have used Outlook 2010 to play around with Exchange 2010 Personal Archives but never Outlook 2007.

As most of you know, Outlook 2007 doesn’t support these by default. However, an update released last January (KB2412171) brings archives to Outlook 2007! However, not completely so support is limited...

After you download and install the update (you don’t need to restart you PC, just close and reopen Outlook), your archive will appear automatically (please see note below) and you will be able to do the following:

• Copy/move messages between your primary mailbox and your archive;
• Copy/move messages between any PST open in Outlook and your archive.

NOTE: if you have full access permissions to another mailbox or archive, these will automatically show up in your Outlook view! This is known as auto-mapping in Outlook 2010 and uses the msExchDelegateListLink AD attribute together with AutoDiscover to achieve this.

However, here’s what you will not be able to do:

• Search across your primary and archive mailboxes at once, only separately;
• Use Personal Tags to override Retention and Archiving Policies set up, if any, on your Exchange 2010 environment.

As this update is now somewhat old, I was expecting for these 2 issues to have been already addressed in another hotfix. However, I was unable to find anything related to this... So, as far as I know, this is still the latest functionality available for Outlook 2007 users.

Don’t forget that the archive is only accessible when you are connected to Exchange as it is never cached locally even when on cached mode.