Multiple Ways to Enable Archive Mailbox in Microsoft 365

Multiple Ways to Enable Archive Mailbox in Microsoft 365

Posted on March 19, 2025

Microsoft 365 provides an Archive Mailbox feature across all subscription plans, offering additional storage ranging from 50 GB to 1 TB. This feature helps users efficiently manage their mailbox by moving older emails to a separate archive, reducing mailbox size, and enhancing overall performance. In this article, we will explore multiple ways to enable Archive Mailbox in Microsoft 365, including the Office 365 Exchange Admin Center, and PowerShell method. Before we begin the step-by-step process to enable Archive mailbox in Office 365, let’s discuss what’s Enable Archive and what are its benefits after enabling it.

What is Exchange Online Archive Mailbox?

In Microsoft 365 an Archive mailbox is like a secondary mailbox, in fact it’s an extra storage space to store your older or unwanted emails. By default, Archive mailbox is disabled in Office 365 for all users. After enabling Archive mailbox feature, you can get extra space for your emails and free up your primary mailbox space. The Archive mailbox feature is available in all Microsoft Outlook including desktop application, web portal, or mobile application.

Benefits of Enabling Microsoft 365 Archive Mailbox

There are multiple benefits of enabling Archive mailbox in Microsoft 365. Some of these below we discuss one by one.

  • Extra Storage Space: It provides extra storage space that helps to keep your main mailbox organized by moving old emails to the archive.
  • Improved Performance: It boosts performance by freeing up space in the primary mailbox.
  • Compliance & Retention: Helps organizations comply with data retention policies.
  • Data Security: Reduces the risk of data loss by maintaining older emails in a secure location.

Methods to Enable Archive Mailbox in Office 365

There are multiple ways to enable archive mailbox in Microsoft 365. Below, we will discuss two effective methods, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your needs.

  1. Using Exchange Admin Center
  2. Via Windows PowerShell

Steps to Enable Office 365 Archive Mailbox using Exchange Admin Center

  • Login to ‘Office 365’ with your credentials and visit the ‘Exchange Admin Center’.
  • Click on ‘Recipients’ >> ‘Mailboxes’ from the navigation pane on the left side of your computer screen. Now you can see all your mailboxes.

Click on Recipients and Mailboxes

  • Select the user whose archive mailbox you want to enable. In the resulting pane click on the ‘Others’ tab and then navigate ‘Manage mailbox archive’ as shown below.

Select the user then go to the Other and click on the Manage mailbox archive

  • Now switch the toggle to ‘Enabled’ then click on the ‘Save’ (Name is optional)

toggle Enabled and click on the Save button to Enabled Archive Mailbox in Office 365

Note: Using Exchange Admin Center, you can enable the archive mailbox individually for each user. However, if you need to enable archive mailboxes in bulk, use the Windows PowerShell method.

Steps to Enable Archive Mailbox in Microsoft 365 via Windows PowerShell

First, you need to connect Exchange Online with Windows PowerShell. Then follow the commands below which we have categorized according to the users for single, all, or selective users.

For Single Mailbox:

After successfully connecting to PowerShell type and run the below command.

Enable-Mailbox -Identity <user mailbox> -Archive

For All Mailbox:

Run the command mentioned below to enable archive mailboxes for all users.

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveStatus -Eq "None" -AND RecipientTypeDetails -Eq "UserMailbox"} | Enable-Mailbox -Archive

For Selective Mailboxes:

First, you need to create a CSV file with the header ‘Email’ as shown in the image below. Once the CSV file is created, provide the file path in the command and then run it.

$users=Import-CSV <filepath>
foreach($user in $users){Enable-Mailbox –Identity $user.Email -Archive}

Create CSV File
For Shared Mailboxes:

If you want to enable archive mailboxes for shared mailboxes, first assign licenses to them. Then use the below command.

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveStatus -Eq "None" -AND RecipientTypeDetails -Eq "SharedMailbox"} | Enable-Mailbox -Archive

Conclusion:

In this blog, we have discussed mailbox archiving, and its benefits and explored multiple ways to enable archive mailbox in Microsoft 365. Archiving helps to manage mailbox storage efficiently and ensures compliance with retention policies. You can choose any of the above methods that best suits your needs and is easy to implement. By enabling archive mailboxes, you can keep your primary mailbox clutter-free and improve overall email management. I hope this blog has provided valuable information and is helpful for you to enable archive mailbox in Office 365.

Also Read: How to increase Office 365 Mailbox size

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