Leaving company how best to remove outlook mailbox

Question

I am using Outlook 2010, using Office 365 as the back-end. At the end of the week I am leaving the company and I want to clean my mailbox. My email is replicated to my own personal laptop.

If I use Outlook backup to produce an OST file, then reopen Outlook and delete all the mail, would that be effective? Should I set the archive option and archive every thing that is a day old?

My Goals are:

1. Backup my mailbox locally so if I need to access it at a later date I can.

2. Remove email content so its no longer held on the mail server. (I understand that our admin team can restore the contents if they so chose)

Answer 1

Backing up your OST file will probably work, but it's more likely to work without any problems if you use Outlook's built-in archiving option. That should also move the messages out of the live mailbox (and off of the server).

As you said, this only removes them from the live mailbox. If there's a backup of your mailbox on the server somewhere (there probably is), then the emails aren't gone until the backup is gone.

Answer 2

1. Just backup your mailbox to PST (not to OST). You can use the free Export Outlook Items to PST File utility for this (set "Move items..." option to delete items in your mailbox after successfull export). You'll be able to open this PST with ease later.

2. This is done automatically if you followed #1. You can also delete empty folders after exporting your mailbox to PST with free Delete Empty Folders tool.

Please note: I recommend these utilities because I'm one of the developers.