Tag: Entra ID

Unable to permanently delete mail enabled user. The mail enabled user has litigation hold or In-Place hold applied on it. Please remove the hold before trying to delete

Here’s a fun little problem that had me stumped for a while until I figured out the correct sequence of commands to run.

Take the following scenario:

You created a MailUser in Exchange Online but for some reason you need to delete it. You attempt to remove it with the command:

Get-MailUser -Identity <MailUser> | Remove-MailUser

But you get the following error: “This mail enabled user cannot be permanently deleted since there is a user associated with this mail enabled user in Azure Active Directory. You will first need to delete the user in Azure Active Directory. Please refer to documentation for more details.”

Oh… okay then. So you remove the user in Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and also make sure it has been removed from Deleted users. Now you try to remove the MailUser in Exchange Online again, this time running:

Get-MailUser -Identity <MailUser> -SoftDeletedMailUser | Remove-MailUser -PermanentlyDelete

But now you get a new error: “Unable to permanently delete mail enabled user. The mail enabled user has litigation hold or In-Place hold applied on it. Please remove the hold before trying to delete”

This is probably due to a default policy that is applied to all UserMailbox / MailUser objects in your organisation. Not a problem… except, how do you remove litigation hold / in-place hold from an object that is now soft-deleted? Especially considering that you cannot restore it because you already deleted the user in Entra ID.

Thankfully the answer is fairly straightforward, just not completely intuitive in my opinion. Run the following command:

Get-MailUser -Identity <MailUser> -SoftDeletedMailUser | Set-MailUser -RemoveLitigationHoldEnabled

Once that is done you can run your original command again to remove the MailUser:

Get-MailUser -Identity <MailUser> | Remove-MailUser

Easy when you know how!