Online Archive

Exchange online archiving offers a place to store older mail that you wish to keep. An archive mailbox is a specialized mailbox that appears alongside primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook on the web. Users can access the archive in the same way that they access their primary mailboxes. In addition, users can search both their archives and primary mailboxes.

The online archive does not count towards the mailbox storage limits. Additionally, archived email does not count towards UA’s total pooled Microsoft storage. Unlike PST files, data in the online archive mailbox is stored in the Office 365 cloud account and not on the personal computer. This will result in your archived data being available online through your Office 365 account even if your computer stops working. Learn more about archiving mail on Microsoft’s website. Microsoft and OIT do not recommend using PST files for archive storage.

Note: the Online Archive / In-Place Archive is not the same feature as the standard Outlook “Archive” folder. The standard Outlook Archive is simply a location to store old messages outside of the inbox and has no affect on storage thresholds. Please do not use the standard Outlook Archive folder; use the Online Archive instead.

To access your Online Archive:

In the left-hand pane beneath the “Inbox” section, find the expandable group called “Online Archive <your user name>.”
Expand the in-place archive to browse archived messages. Messages will be sorted in the same folder structure they were located in when filed in your main mailbox.
Searching using the main search window at the top of the screen defaults to “Current Mailbox” as the search scope. Changing the scope on the Search tab of the ribbon or in the search drop-down by the search field to “All mailboxes” will search both your main mailbox and your online archive.

Visit Outlook Online
In the left-hand pane beneath the “Inbox” section, find the expandable group called “In-Place Archive <your display name>.”
Expand the in-place archive to browse archived messages. Messages will be sorted in the same folder structure they were located in when filed in your main mailbox.
Searching using the main search window at the top of the screen will search both your main mailbox and your online archive.

In the left-hand pane beneath the “Inbox” folders, find the expandable broup called “Online Archive.”
Expand the online archive section to browse archived messages. Messages will be sorted in the same folder structure they were located in when filed in your main mailbox.
Searching using the main search window at the top of the screen will search both your main mailbox and your online archive.

Online archiving is an automated process that runs periodically on the email server itself. The “Managed Folder Assistant” process spends a certain amount of time per day per mailbox moving data from live mailboxes to archive mailboxes; therefore, email may not move on the exact specified date depending on the process workload.