Hi Everyone this is Prem, I have worked as Microsoft 365 support ambassador. We see a lot of ticket where the users wants 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:
Open browser > visit https://Office.com and Sign in with your admin account, Once signed in Click on the Admin tile.
Under all admin center we will click on Exchange admin center :
Then we will click on Classic Exchange admin center :
Then click on Recipient and Select the user from the list on which you want to enable archiving :
On the right side tab click on enable to enable Archiving on the mailbox.
Once enabled it will start to move the email to the archiving as per the retention policy, the Default retention policy is set to move emails older then 2 years to archive.
If you want to change the retention policy you can do that same by going to the compliance management tab :
You can create new policy and add new tags using the Retention policy tab and the Retention tags tab.
To apply a different Retention policy or to see the current one applied on a mailbox go back to the recipients tab and Select the users by double clicking on the name, Click on mailbox feature :
Under Retention policy you will see the current policy applied to the mailbox, if you want to change it , click on the drop down and select a retention policy and click save to save the changes.
It should take minimum of 24 hours to max of 7 days for the retention policy to start the email moving process.
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
