Recovering a former employee’s mailbox two years after they left

The challenge

An Australian IT company became involved in a legal matter that required access to historical email correspondence involving a former salesperson. The employee had left approximately two years earlier and their Microsoft 365 mailbox had long since been removed.

The company needed to retrieve historical messages the former employee had sent to a client, including email that had previously been deleted from the user’s mailbox.

What Bang IT did

Because the company’s Microsoft 365 environment was protected by an independent cloud backup service, Bang IT was able to work from historical backup data rather than relying on the mailbox still existing inside Microsoft 365.

We located the former employee’s protected mailbox data and restored the required historical information. This included email that was no longer present in the user’s mailbox at the time they left the organisation.

The outcome

The client was able to retrieve correspondence dating back to a user who had left the business approximately two years earlier.

The incident demonstrated an important distinction between Microsoft 365 availability and independent backup: sometimes recovery is not about an accidental deletion that happened yesterday; it can involve information that suddenly becomes important years later.