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In Outlook365 one can create email group. People in the group can be "members" or "owners". Owners have privileges such as being able to add new members or even delete the group completely.

Is it possible for a group owner to delete the email history of a group, so messages that had been sent to the group do not appear in Outlook for any members of the group, without deleting the group completely? Is this possible if the outlook group is restricted to one organisation?

Would it be possible for the administrators of the organisation's Office365 to do this, or to recover deleted email?

This relates to an "Office 365 A1" account as part of Office for Schools.

(Context, I'd created an email group for members of staff, and I'd made everyone an "owner" The group had been being used, and there were emails that discussed negotiations with school management. This morning, the emails have all gone. I don't want to accuse the management of deliberately being obstructive if there is a simple explanation in terms of a group member/owner deleting or moving emails in the belief that they were only doing so for themselves, but accidentally affecting all group members)

James K
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1 Answers1

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Email Group? Did you mean Distribution List?

As far as I know, we could use Content Search Action to delete emails(Search for and delete email messages):

  1. Create a Content/Compliance Search via Compliance Center or PowerShell enter image description here

Example: New-ComplianceSearch -Name "Hold-Tailspin Toys" -ExchangeLocation "Research Department" -ContentMatchQuery "'Patent' AND 'Project Tailspin Toys'"

  1. Use Content Search Action to purge emails(You need connect to Compliance Center PowerShell before creating a content search action: Connect to the Security & Compliance Center):

New-ComplianceSearchAction -SearchName "Remove Phishing Message" -Purge -PurgeType SoftDelete

enter image description here

If the emails sent to a distribution list were deleted, because the issue was happened on the organization level, maybe the compliance search action is the culprit, try to run the following commands to see if there're some content search and actions to delete emails:

enter image description here

For recovering emails, maybe the following docs is helpful to you: Recover deleted messages in a user's mailbox in Exchange Online

Ivan_Wang
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