How to Recover Deleted Mailboxes in Office 365?

Your crucial Office 365 data is deleted on accident or any other reasons. This blog will help you by explaining the different factors that could lead to losing your data and the solutions to recover deleted mailbox Office 365.
The mailbox of Office 365 is structured in a way in which you can manage email, contacts, calendars, tasks, etc. Other than that, there are different types of mailbox in Microsoft 365 for different purposes.
- User Mailbox: It is also known as the primary mailbox which is assigned to all the licensed users. Here, you can store email, contacts and integrate with your OneDrive.
- Shared Mailbox: This mailbox is created to read and send messages from several users using a common email address. You don’t need a separate license required if the mailbox size is in 50 GB.
- Resource Mailbox: It is used for your scheduling resources like Room Mailbox or Equipment Mailbox. You can manage this using the calendar interface.
- Microsoft 365 Groups: It is a Group Mailbox using the Microsoft 365 Group. This also provides you with a shared mailbox, calendar, files in SharePoint, and many collaborative products.
- Archive Mailbox: Lastly, In-Place Archive, a secondary mailbox which stores older emails automatically or manually other than primary mailbox.
Having to manage your data in your Microsoft 365 can be a difficult job because of handling all the data all at once. So, issues like deletion of your O365 mailbox is one of the common problems.
Why Is Your Office 365 Mailbox Deleted?
When your mailbox is deleted, other than restoring your Office 365 emails. A second thought comes into your mind is why this happened. For this, we have mentioned some factors that cause you to lose your data.
- When your Microsoft 365 license expires or is removed, your mailbox goes to a soft-deleted state. Which is why you want to restore your Office 365 emails.
- Your account is deleted from the Azure Active Directory could also make your mailbox deleted.
- Retention Policies automatically delete your emails or mailboxes after completion of a certain time period.
- Accidental deletions are one of the common reasons for your mailbox deletions.
As you can see there are a number of reasons why your Microsoft 365 mailbox is lost. But, to recover them there are several ways you can try. In the next section of the article we are going to see different ways to recover deleted mailbox Office 365.
Read Also: How to Download Office 365 Emails?
How can you Restore Office 365 Mailbox?
When we searched through the internet, we found several ways that you can use, such as.
- Network Upload
- Drive Shipping Solution
- Automated Method
Don’t worry, we are going through each method one by one with simple steps. So let’s start.
Recover Deleted Mailbox in Office 365 using Network Upload
The second free method to restore Office 365 emails from backup is the Network Upload method using Azure AzCopy. Follow this guide to use this process:
- Copy the SAS URL and install Azure AzCopy.
- Upload the PST file you made to Office 365.
- Create a PST Import mapping file.
- Create a PST Import job for Outlook in Office 365.
- Use Filters to import PST to Office 365 shared or primary mailbox.
Limitations of this method
- The process is complex, time-taking and not available in some regions.
- The process has to get repeated to export more email accounts to Office 365.
Retrieve Lost Microsoft 365 Emails with Drive Shipping
Another method you can use to restore Office 365 mailbox from backup is the Drive Shipping method which involves copying the Office 365 PST data onto a hard drive & shipping it to one of the physical locations of Microsoft. And another thing to note about this method is that only the admins and the companies migrating the email data should use it.
Follow these steps to restore Office 365 emails:
- Download the secure storage key and a PST Import tool.
- Use the tool to copy the PST file into a hard drive.
- Create a PST mapping file.
- Ship the hard drive to Microsoft with a tracking number.
- After Microsoft receives your hard disk and finishes working on it, start filtering the data and create an Outlook PST Import job.
Limitations of this method
- You need to send the data to Microsoft on a hard drive physically.
- The process is time-taking (1-2 weeks) and expensive ($2 per GB), which many companies can’t afford.
- Network Upload and Drive Shipping methods are highly technical, and many Outlook users avoid them because they don’t have the expertise to use them.
Automated Method to Restore Deleted Office 365 Data
The manual methods described above fall short of restoring the Office 365 mailbox because the Import/Export Wizard can import or export only a single PST file at a time, and the latter two methods are technical and involve expertise to use them, leaving no option for Outlook users to migrate emails manually.
Therefore, the best method to restore Office 365 mailbox from backup is to use an automated tool, ensuring no data loss. We are discussing one tool you can use for restoring your Office 365 mailbox – the BitRecover Office 365 Backup Tool.
Features of the Tool
This tool has many features, and some of these are:
- This tool can save Outlook 365 emails to the hard drive with the email folder structure and other components intact.
- Restore locally stored email like PST, OST, MSG, MBOX, and EML.
- This tool can export Office 365 mailboxes to PST, MSG, EML, MBOX, etc.
- Extract email addresses from the desktop and cloud email files for business purposes.
Steps to Recover Deleted Mailbox Office 365
- Install the tool on your system and open it after installation.
- Enter Office 365 email address and passwords, then Login as admin.
- Once the tool fetches all your data, select the email you want to restore.
- Choose any option from the saving options.
- Browse a location and click on the backup button.
Conclusion
Office 365 is the product family of productivity software & cloud-based services by Microsoft, having applications like Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. We discussed the reasons and the solutions to restore Office 365 mailbox from backup.
The manual method to restore Office 365 emails from a previous backup involves exporting Outlook emails through the Network Upload, and Drive Shipping methods. But these two require technical expertise, when you have a single mailbox for migration. On the other hand, the automated method requires no technical expertise but just a few minutes to restore your Office 365 emails back to your account.