What is Microsoft 365 Online Email Archiving?
The online archive feature is for customers who have uncommonly large mailboxes. A user’s online archive acts somewhat like a second account in Outlook with its own folder within your OU email account. As a result, it isn’t included in normal searches performed from the inbox. For how to search through your email archive for previous emails that were placed in the archive, please see these directions.
Signs That You May Need Email Archiving
There are a couple of signs that you may experience that point to needing to have the archiving feature enabled.
- Someone tries to send you an email but the email comes back to the sender with a message that the person they tried to email has a full inbox.
- A message from Microsoft may suddenly appear in your Outlook that it is full or close to full. It may look like the image below but not all messages will look the same or be in the same location:
- You notice you cannot send, receive, or delete emails. These limitations will persist regardless of if you are using the Outlook desktop client, another mail client (such as a the Mail app on an iPhone), or on a browser at outlook.office.com. Suddenly not being able to send emails is a common first sign that your mailbox has exceeded its storage limits.
I didn't have this problem before. Why is this happening now?
This issue can happen when you change account type such as going from a full-time employee account type to a part-time employee, as part-time employees receive a smaller mailbox quota. An account type change can cause your account to go from having an A3 license with 100 gigabytes of email storage to an A1 license with 50 gigabytes of email storage. You may also experience this if you have had an OU email for many years (typically 10+ years) and/or regularly send or receive large emails containing videos, photos, or other large file types.
What to do if you are having email storage problems
If you are encountering any of the issues listed above please contact us via this form or give us a call at (405)325-HELP (4357) for assistance. When contacting us here is some helpful information to have ready for us when you call or to add to a ticket you are submitting with this issue:
- When did this problem start?
- Has your employee status/position changed recently? If so, when?
- If you can, please be ready to provide any screenshots of the error message you see. If you are taking a screenshot of an error within your email account or from an email, please make sure to exclude any personal/confidential information that may be in email headers or the body of an email.
- Be prepared to provide a non-OU email address that OU IT can use to communicate with you until your OU email account is working normally again.
If you are unable to send, receive, and/or delete emails: We highly encourage you to try to reach out to any important contacts using other methods and give them an alternate email they can contact you at while our team investigates.
How long will it take for email archiving to be applied to my account?
After our team has enabled archiving for your account it can take 24-48 hours for your account to complete the archive process. Once the online archive is enabled, any message that is two years old and over will be automatically moved to the Online Archive folder in your email account. If you are still experiencing issues with email storage after 48 hours of the achieve being enabled, please let us know through your ticket so that we can look into this issue further.
Information for After Email Archiving Is Enabled
Once an online archive has been created, you will need to run a search in the archive folder to find any messages that have been moved into the archive. The normal Outlook search will not automatically search the archive for messages. To find your archive folders location, see Microsoft’s documentation here. Once you click the folder and see its contents you can use the same search methods to find something within the archive folder.
Note for Outlook for Mac: Outlook for Mac supports only the mail module. If you moved folders, calendar items, contacts, tasks, or notes to your archive in any other version of Outlook, such as Outlook for Windows, you won't be able to view them in the online archive mailbox using Outlook for Mac.