Recover Deleted Shared Mailbox Office 365: What you Need to Know
For both home users and enterprise users, managing shared mailboxes through the corporate email system of Office 365 is a highly efficient management approach. However, accidentally deleting a shared mailbox can be extremely frustrating. In this guide, we'll guide you through 3 methods to recover deleted shared mailbox in Office 365.
Overview about Office 365 and Exchange Online
Office 365, now known as Microsoft 365, is a cloud-based suite of productivity tools provided by Microsoft. It is designed to help businesses and individuals collaborate more effectively. As part of this suite, Exchange Online is the cloud version of Microsoft Exchange, offering secure and reliable email services for businesses. It allows for the management of emails, calendars, contacts, and tasks, all hosted in the cloud.
One of the key features of Exchange Online is its ability to support shared mailboxes, allowing multiple users to access the same email account. These shared mailboxes are especially useful for teams or departments that need to manage a common email address, such as "[email protected]" or "[email protected]".
However, sometimes these shared mailboxes may get accidentally deleted or experience data loss. If a shared mailbox in Office 365 is accidentally deleted, all members will be unable to access the mailbox via Outlook. Additionally, the shared mailbox's calendar, contact list, and tasks will be deleted simultaneously. In such cases, it’s essential to know how to recover a deleted shared mailbox in Office 365.
How to Recover Deleted Shared Mailbox in Office 365
If a shared mailbox is deleted in Office 365, you typically have a 30-day retention period to recover it, thanks to Office 365’s soft-delete feature. After this period, the mailbox is permanently deleted (also known as hard-delete) unless you have backups or use advanced recovery methods. Below are three methods to recover deleted shared mailbox in Office 365.
Using Exchange Admin Center
Office 365 provides a built - in mechanism for recovering deleted shared mailboxes within a specific 30 days. Follow these steps to recover deleted shared mailbox using Microsoft 365 admin center.
Step 1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 Admin center, click on "Admin Centers" and select "Exchange". This will open the Exchange Admin Center.
Step 2. In the Exchange Admin Center, click on "Recipients" in the left-hand navigation pane. Then, choose "Mailboxes" from the list.
Step 3. Find the shared mailbox you want to recover. If the mailbox is still within the 30-day retention period, you will see it listed here. Select the mailbox and click "Recover deleted items" to recover it.
Using Exchange Online PowerShell
PowerShell can be used to restore deleted mailboxes, especially if you're comfortable with command-line tools. This is useful for more advanced scenarios or bulk recovery.
Step 1. Press "Win +X" and select "Windows Powershell (Admin)" to open it.
Step 2. Type the following command "conncet-exchangeonline" to connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.
Step 3. Type the following command to list the deleted mailboxes that you want to restore:
"Get-Mailbox -SoftDeletedMailbox | Select-Object Name,ExchangeGuid"
Step 4. Type the following command to create a target mailbox for the restored mailbox:
"Get-Mailbox -Identity | Format-List ExchangeGuid"
Step 5. Replace with the GUID value from Step 3, and with the GUID value from Step 4, and run the following cmdlet to restore the mailbox:
"New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SourceMailbox -TargetMailbox"
Using Third-party Backup Tool (After 30 Days)
If a shared mailbox has been deleted for more than 30 days, the recovery difficulty will increase significantly. If you used other Microsoft 365 backup tools to back up the shared mailbox before it was deleted, you can directly restore the shared mailbox and its permissions from the backup.
Further Reading: How to Recover Deleted Email in Windows
In cases where the shared mailbox has been permanently deleted (more than 30 days ago) and there is no backup within backup tool, third-party tools like MyRecover can be invaluable for restoring deleted emails. MyRecover offers an easy-to-use solution for recovering lost or deleted emails from Office 365 and Exchange Online accounts. It is particularly useful if you need to restore deleted emails on Exchange Online beyond the native retention period.

- Supports Various Data Loss Causes: tackle data loss from accidental deletion, formatting errors, virus attacks, power failure, and system crashes.
- Simple and Fast Recovery Process: Just select your external hard drive, scan for lost files, preview recoverable data, and restore what you need with a few clicks.
- Deep and Quick Scan Modes: quick scans for recently deleted files and deep scans that thoroughly analyze your drive for hard-to-find data, maximizing your chances of recovery.
- Wide Range of File Types: from documents and photos to videos and emails, MyRecover can recover1000+file formats from different devices.
It's important to note before starting the deleted emails recovery steps that, Exchange Online will only generate local files on Windows if you have enabled "Cached Exchange Mode" (which is enabled by default) and are using the Microsoft Outlook client with an Exchange Online account. Generally, Exchange Online stores these cache files (with the ".ost" file extension) in the following path:
C:\Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook
Now follow these steps to recover deleted emails on Windows using MyRecover.
Step 1. Download and install MyRecover on your computer from secure channel.
Step 2. Launch it and select the Outlook cache folder to scan for lost email files, then click "Scan".
Step 3. Choose the files you want to recover from the recoverable lists and click "Recover". You can preview the file content to confirm whether it is the file you want to recover.
Step 4. Select a safe location (no the original one) to save the recovered files.
Once the process is finished, the message "Files have been recovered successfully" will pop up. Then you can check the recovered files by clicking the destination path.
Conclusion
Whether you are managing a team’s shared mailbox in Office 365 or dealing with a personal mailbox, knowing how to recover deleted shared mailbox Office 365 is crucial. Fortunately, these methods above offer a viable path to recovery.
If you're seeking a solution to recover deleted emails, MyRecover is an excellent choice. It can not only recover local email cache files but also retrieve data from inaccessible hard drives, deleted partitions, formatted USB drives, and even crashed systems. For both home and enterprise users, the Technician Edition of MyRecover allows using one license across multiple computers, meeting your needs perfectly.