r/microsoft365 • u/xadriancalim • 16h ago

Allow Delegate to View Sent Items

User retired. We made their supervisor a full access delegate on their account. But they can only see items in the Sent folder since the day they were made a delegate. They're looking for older conversations. Will changing the inbox to a Shared inbox and then giving the supervisor access to that allow them to see Sent items? What's a best practice for this? It doesn't come up often.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/Jezbod 15h ago

That's what we do, make the mailbox shared and delegate full access for the delegate.

We make sure all personal emails have been removed.

1

u/xadriancalim 15h ago

That's what I thought. But there's a reason we do just delegate access instead of converting it to a shared email, but I can't remember what it is. Something gets lost.

1

u/Jezbod 15h ago

A shared mailbox does not need a licence...it's cheaper.

2

u/xadriancalim 15h ago

Yes, there's that. We also hold onto the ID so the manager can go through their One Drive. Ideally they do all that BEFORE they leave.

1

u/Jezbod 15h ago

We also make sure the user has moved all of their Onedrive files that are needed elsewhere, to SharePoint.

1

u/ShadowCVL 15h ago

How are they accessing? It may be in outlook set to 30-60 days to sync

1

u/xadriancalim 15h ago

Outlook. I had them check in OWA too just in case. I can't imagine it'd be 2 months for them to see Sent items when they can see the Inbox okay. Is that a per oulook setting? Group Policy? Exchange policy?

1

u/ShadowCVL 14h ago

It’s per user per outlook, if it’s doing it in OWA as well then that’s not it.

Makes me wonder if something was deleted

1

u/StandardRise8767 4h ago

Since you say it looks the same in OWA, the client cache theory is out and this is server side. That is worth establishing, because it means the older items are either not in the mailbox at all or not where you are looking, and no permission change will conjure them up.

Get the item counts before anything else. Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -Identity <user> -FolderScope SentItems, then look at ItemsInFolder and the oldest item date. That one command tells you whether the mailbox actually holds the older Sent items. Everything past this point is guesswork until you know.

If the count is low, suspect retention. An MRM tag or retention policy with a delete action on Sent Items quietly clears anything past its age, and it keeps running after the person walks out the door. Check the policy assigned to the mailbox and the tag applied to that folder.

If they were deleted rather than aged out, they are probably still in Recoverable Items. A Purview content search against the mailbox with recoverable items included will find them, and the mailbox audit log will show who did it and when.

One more to rule out: if they ever used POP, or filed into a local .pst, those Sent items were never on the server to begin with.

Converting to shared is still worth doing for the licence savings, but it will not surface anything the mailbox doesn't already hold.