Accessing Archived Emails (Online Archive)

This is a guide on how to best access and search archived emails in your Microsoft 365 mailbox. This is best done through OWA (365 webmail). This guide is only applicable if you have some form of auto-archiving enabled. The same archived email structure is also visible through your Outlook app and will be labelled: "Online Archive" or "In-Place Archive". The app does not cache all email so the OWA search is usually more complete. 

The first thing to ensure is that you have direct access or delegated access to the mailbox that contains the archive. If you do not have access, please request this from Purple Computing; it will need approval from an authorised IT Liaison.

1. Log in to the Mailbox:

• Please open Outlook on the web (https://outlook.office.com) through your default web browser and sign in with your Microsoft 365 credentials if necessary. If the archive you wish to search is in this fully licensed mailbox, you can proceed to step (3), below.
• If the target mailbox is a 'Shared' mailbox, you will need to have delegate permissions, and the shared mailbox will need to be opened in a new tab as per (2) below. 

2. Accessing a 'Shared' mailbox with delegate access:

• Click your profile icon in the top right (this will usually be indicated by your initials), then click 'Open another mailbox'
• Type in the name of the mailbox. i.e. projects@
• Select the mailbox and then click Open

The targeted mailbox will open in a new tab - continue to step (3) below

3. Locating the "Online Archive" or "In-Place Archive" to search:

• Check the folder pane on the left-hand side. Towards the bottom, underneath the main mailbox: 'Folders', there should be an additional, expandable section titled 'Online Archive' or 'In-Place Archive'.
• Expand this and you should see a matching folder structure to the main 'Inbox' folder structure.
• You can now navigate to the subfolder that contains the archived emails that you need.
• Now, you can use the Search Bar  at the top and type your query to find a specific email.
• You can click on the small dropdown arrow to the left of the search bar to change the search parameters. By default, it will usually start on the subfolder you are in, but you can change this to 'All folders in archive' to widen the search. 
• You can click on the 3 lines at the far right end of the search bar and utilise further parameters to help target your search, such as 'To', 'From', etc.