When mailboxes grow too large you won’t be able to receive or send mail anymore. Another common issue with large mailboxes is that Outlook will take longer to load. To solve this we can use Online Archives in Outlook.
Online Archive mailboxes are available for Office365 users with the correct license. The advantage of online archives (also known as In-Place archives), is that older emails are automatically archived in a separate archive mailbox.
What is Outlook Online Archive
Before we are going to take a look at the requirements and how to use the Online Archive, let’s first take a look at what Outlook Online Archive is exactly. And how it’s different from the normal archive.
As the name implies, it’s an online archive mailbox. This gives the Exchange Online Archive a couple of important characteristics:
- It’s only accessible with an internet connection
- Data isn’t stored on the user’s computer – saving disk space
- It’s a separate mailbox
By archiving email to the In-place archive you can thus free up disk space on the user’s computer. This will also help with reducing the loading time of Outlook. And it also helps with cleaning up the mailbox, because by default Outlook only searches in the primary mailbox.
Online Archive vs Archive folder
Every Outlook mailbox comes with an Archive folder. Users can move emails to their archive folder to clean up their inbox or use the Archive button for this. The difference between this folder and the Online Archive is that the Archive folder is part of the primary mailbox of the user.
This means that it doesn’t reduce the mailbox size and that email items in the archive are still displayed in the search result.
You can also archive your mail to local PST files. The problem with PST files is that you will need to be sure that they are backed up. Otherwise, you risk losing data when the user’s device is lost or the hard drive crashes.
Another problem with PST files is that they can only be accessed from the computer where the PST file is located. The online archive, for example, can also be accessed from Outlook Online or the Outlook App.
Exchange Online Archiving License
The Exchange Online Archive is available with most Office 365 plans. Depending on your license you will have access to either 50GB or 1.5TB of archiving space.
The following plans have access to 50GB of archive space:
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Office 365 E1
And the plans below have an Online Archive of 1.5TB:
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium
- Office 365 E3
- Office 365 E5
- Microsoft 365 E3
- Microsoft 365 E5
Shared and Resource mailboxes also have an Exchange Online Archive mailbox, but these are limited to 50GB. If you need a larger archive for a shared mailbox you will need to assign an E3 or E5 license to the mailbox.
Online Archive Size Limit
Good to know that the 1.5TB archive limit isn’t the initial archive size. The online archive is initially limited to 100 GB. When the only archive is almost full (at 90%) you can increase it with auto-expanding archiving.
This will add another 100 GB of storage limit until the archive reaches the limit of 1.5 TB. Keep in mind that it can take up to 30 days before the additional storage space is added.
You can refer to the following link to Enable/Disable Online Archiving.
Enable Online Archive - Admin Help – BEMO Docs (bemopro.com)
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