Filter and Remove thousands of emails from an Office365 mailbox

[DaveMurphy]

A colleague went on holiday to China, whilst they were there they signed into a public computer to check their college emails. (facepalm)

 

When they got home their college email account had been spammed. (you can see where I'm going with this)

 

The account had 900,000 emails in the inbox of failed delivery receipts from the spam trying to send emails from the account and failing.

 

Since then the spam has stopped coming into the mailbox however I need to now remove the emails that are already on the account!

 

I've added the mailbox to Outlook 2013 and created several rules to filter the emails from the inbox and move them into the deleted items folder - the rule has constantly been running day and night for the past 2 weeks.

 

I'm now on 65,9572 emails, it's deleted 27k in the last 24 hours.

 

Since we're on Office365 for Education is there any other way we can have removed or remove the emails faster?

 

Abandoning the mailbox is a no go as well.

[Sam_Brown]

Run a rule to move everything before the spam date to a folder. Copy folder to new mailbox. Delete spam mail box and recreate and copy back in the old stuff.

 

Would that work?

[EduTech]

do the NDRs come from a single e-mail address? or are they all unique/different?

 

I suppose you could do a search for all e-mails that contain a specific word, and they maybe place the rule upon that to then send to deleted items, and then delete them from there. It might be easier to do this via Outlook Client as oppose to OWA.

 

I'm just thinking out loud, let me have a think about this properly tomorrow to see if they maybe another way to get through this.

 

James.

[FN-GM]

do the NDRs come from a single e-mail address? or are they all unique/different?

 

I suppose you could do a search for all e-mails that contain a specific word, and they maybe place the rule upon that to then send to deleted items, and then delete them from there. It might be easier to do this via Outlook Client as oppose to OWA.

 

I'm just thinking out loud, let me have a think about this properly tomorrow to see if they maybe another way to get through this.

 

James.

 

They have done that but its taking ages.

[DaveMurphy]

do the NDRs come from a single e-mail address? or are they all unique/different?

 

I suppose you could do a search for all e-mails that contain a specific word, and they maybe place the rule upon that to then send to deleted items, and then delete them from there. It might be easier to do this via Outlook Client as oppose to OWA.

 

I'm just thinking out loud, let me have a think about this properly tomorrow to see if they maybe another way to get through this.

 

James.

 

Since the emails aren't from one specific sender; the rule is on Outlook 13 running constant moving the emails to the deleted items folder.

 

The rules so far this morning have moved 10 thousand emails to the deleted folder. 648363 left!

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Run a rule to move everything before the spam date to a folder. Copy folder to new mailbox. Delete spam mail box and recreate and copy back in the old stuff.

 

Would that work?

 

There's simply too many emails in the account prior to this for us to do this, it was my first thought.

[FN-GM]

As a lesson i think you should make the user sort this for themselves

[EduTech]

They have done that but its taking ages.

 

ah yeah! it was late #nosleep!

 

In terms of doing this quicker, you can try opening a support request and speaking to one of the Exchange Online engineers they maybe able to do something although it's unlikely because you want mail to be moved from someone's mailbox and in the interests of privacy etc. I would say the answer would be no, and there is no way via powershell that i know off for you as the global administrator to do such.

 

It might just have to be a long wait..

 

James.