How to enable Archiving for free in Office 365

Hi everyone, this is Prem, I have worked as Microsoft 365 support ambassador. We see a lot of ticket where the users want to know about how to enable archiving for free in Office 365, in this post I will be sharing the same.

If you enable archiving on a user mailbox on exchange online plan 1 you will get 50 gb of Archiving free, if the users is on Exchange online plan 2 then you will get 100gb archiving with auto expanding feature.

You can enable archiving on Shared mailboxes as well which does not have licenses and are free of cost.

So for us to be able to see the option to turn on Archiving in office 365, we will have to use a global admin account or a exchange admin account, Once you have the account with the required access, we can move on with the steps below.

Steps to Enable Archiving for free:

Go to Exchange admin center: https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/#/mailboxes

Search for the User account or Shared mailbox:

Click on their name > click on Others tab.Under Mailbox archive you should see the current status of the archive and to change it click on Manage mailbox archive option.

Toggle the button for Mailbox archive status as above to enable it.

Once enabled, it will start to move the email to the archive as per the retention policy.

To check the policy, go back to the same page in Exchange admin center: https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/#/mailboxes 

Search for the mailbox and click on its name > Then click on Mailbox tab and scroll down to the bottom and look for Retention policy.

If you see Default MRM policy applied there, that mean emails older than 2 years in the user’s mailbox should be moved to the archive, you can confirm if the user have emails older than 2 years.

If you want to create new Custom Retention policy as per your need, refer this ARTICLE.

It should take minimum of 24 hours or max of 7 days for the retention policy to start the emails moving process.

If you are facing issue with emails not moving to archive please refer this ARTICLE.

In this way we can enable archiving for free in Office 365.

Date: 2/1/2022

Author: Prem

Tags: How to Enable Archiving for free in Office 365