Applying mailbox holds in Microsoft Exchange

There are multiple ways in which organizations can prevent data in mailboxes from being deleted in Microsoft 365. Exchange Online provides a feature called holds that enables this functionality, as well as retention policies and labels that we have already discussed in the Implementing retention policies and tags in Microsoft Exchange section of this chapter.

Exchange Online has two different type of mailbox holds:

• Litigation hold: This prevents any content that is stored in the mailbox from being deleted and is set on a mailbox level.
• eDiscovery hold: This prevents mailbox data that matches a specific search criterion from being purged or modified and it is created in an eDiscovery case.

Applying a litigation hold

In this section, we will run through an exercise to apply a litigation hold on a mailbox from the Exchange Admin Center and Exchange Online PowerShell module:

1. Browse to the Exchange Admin Center...