How can I easily grant access to a terminated employee's mailbox including deleted items? If I have the terminated employee's mailbox on litigation hold the deleted items are in the recovery folder, but can the recovery folder only be viewed through e-discovery process?

Thanks!

Hi 

If you are managing exchange for your organization , you may proceed by granting yourself full access to mailbox.

As the litigation hold is already enabled for the mailbox, an Exchange admin (who is a member of the Discovery Management Role Group) can perform an eDiscovery search to import the items that deleted in recover deleted items folder (hard deleted) into a .pst file. For how to assign eDiscovery permissions in Exchange, please refer to following link:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298059(v=exchg.150).aspx

Please follow the steps in the following article to perform an eDiscovery search.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298021(v=exchg.150).aspx

If the mailbox is placed on litigation hold or has single item recovery enabled, it's important to preserve the mailbox data until the litigation hold is removed or single item recovery is disabled. Therefore, you need to perform more detailed steps to clean up the Recoverable Items folder.

Also to make sure no items are deleted from the Recoverable Items folder, increase the Recoverable Items quota, increase the Recoverable Items warning quota, and set the deleted item retention period to a value higher than the current size of the user's Recoverable Items folder. This is particularly important for preserving messages for mailboxes placed on litigation hold. 

If the mailbox resides on a mailbox database in a database availability group (DAG), you must disable the Managed Folder Assistant on each DAG member that hosts a copy of the database. If the database fails over to another server, this prevents the Managed Folder Assistant on that server from deleting mailbox data.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee364755(v=exchg.150).aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee861123(v=exchg.141).aspx

Hi Viper,

Thank you for your question.

We could run the following command to grant full access permission on terminated user:

Add-MailboxPermission Identity <terminated user> -User <your name> -AccessRights FullAccess InheritanceType all

If I have the terminated employee's mailbox on litigation hold the deleted items are in the recovery folder, but can the recovery folder only be viewed through e-discovery process?

A: Yes, we could be granted only viewer to the specific user, we could refer to the following link:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298021(v=exchg.150).aspx  

Authorized users can perform an In-Place eDiscovery search by selecting the mailboxes, and then specifying search criteria such as keywords, start and end dates, sender and recipient addresses, and message types. After the search is complete, authorized users can then select one of the following actions:

• Estimate search results   This option returns an estimate of the total size and number of items that will be returned by the search based on the criteria you specified.
• Preview search results   This option provides a preview of the results. Messages returned from each mailbox searched are displayed.
• Copy search results   This option lets you copy messages to a discovery mailbox.
• Export search results   After search results are copied to a discovery mailbox, you can export them to a PST file.

If there are any questions regarding this issue, please be free to let me know. 

Best Regard,

Jim

If the mailbox resides on a mailbox database in a database availability group (DAG), you must disable the Managed Folder Assistant on each DAG member that hosts a copy of the database. If the database fails over to another server, this prevents the Managed Folder Assistant on that server from deleting mailbox data.