Use Exchange Online PowerShell to display Microsoft 365 or Office 365 mailbox information

Admins can learn how to use Exchange Online PowerShell to display information about mailboxes in their Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization.

To give you an idea of some of the things you can do with PowerShell in Microsoft 365 and Office 365, let's take a look at user mailboxes in Exchange Online PowerShell.

Before you begin

To connect to Exchange Online PowerShell, see Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.

Display mailbox information with Exchange Online PowerShell

You can easily get information about a single user mailbox. For example, here's a command that returns some information about Ken Myer's mailbox:

Get-Mailbox -Identity "Ken Myer"

This command will return something similar to this:

Name      Alias       ServerName      ProhibitSendQuota
----      -----       ----------      -----------------
kenmyer   kenmyer     bn1pr02mb038    49.5 GB (53,150,220,288 bytes)

You can see things like Ken's alias and his mailbox size quota. But there's a lot more information that's associated with an Exchange Online mailbox than just the four properties returned by the Get-Mailbox cmdlet.

Here's an example command that displays all the information for a specific mailbox:

Get-Mailbox -Identity "Ken Myer" | Format-List

The command instructs Exchange Online PowerShell to return all of the available properties for the mailbox in a list. There are about 200 different properties and property values. You can also use the Format-List and Format-Table cmdlets to return only specific property values. For example, you can also view litigation hold-related properties for Ken Myer with this command:

Get-Mailbox -Identity "Ken Myer" | Format-List DisplayName, LitigationHoldEnabled, LitigationHoldDate, LitigationHoldOwner, LitigationHoldDuration

You can also use wildcard characters when working with the Format-List cmdlet. For example, all the litigation hold properties start with the letters lit. You can retrieve this same information by using this command:

Get-Mailbox -Identity "Ken Myer" | Format-List DisplayName, Lit*

This command tells Get-Mailbox to retrieve the value of Ken's DisplayName property along with the values of any properties that have names that begin with the letters lit. Here's an example of what we get back:

DisplayName            : Ken Myer
LitigationHoldEnabled  : False
LitigationHoldDate     :
LitigationHoldOwner    :
LitigationHoldDuration : Unlimited

You can return information about multiple mailboxes by leaving out the Identity parameter. This example returns the DisplayName and LitigationHoldEnabled properties for all mailboxes:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Format-Table DisplayName, LitigationHoldEnabled -Auto

In many cases, you only want to look at a subset of your mailboxes. For example, suppose you are asked to come up with a list of all the mailboxes that have been assigned a litigation hold. You can use the Where-Object cmdlet in conjunction with the Get-Mailbox cmdlet. The Where-Object cmdlet needs a filter phrase to tell Exchange Online PowerShell what set of mailboxes you are interested in.

In their simplest form, filter phrases use the syntax "<PropertyName> -<ComparisonOperator> <PropertyValue>".

Some commonly used comparison operators are:

• eq (equals; not case-sensitive)

• ne (does not equal; not case-sensitive)

• gt (greater than)

• lt (less than)

For a complete list of comparison operators, see Where-Object.

Values for <PropertyValue> depend on the property, and can be values like strings, numbers, Boolean values ( $True or $False), or no value ( $Null). Text values with spaces require quotation marks around the value. Numerical values, Boolean values, and $Null don't require quotation marks around the value.

Returning to our example of all the mailboxes that have been assigned a litigation hold, the filter phrase is "LitigationHoldEnabled -eq $True":

• The property name is LitigationHoldEnabled.

• The comparison operator is eq.

• The property value we're looking for is $True.

Once you have the filter phrase, you can construct the Where-Object portion of the command using this syntax:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.<Filter Phrase>}

Here's the command for our example:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.LitigationHoldEnabled -eq $True}

For another example, suppose you'd like to make sure that all of your users have the junk email rule enabled. Here's a quick command to find any users who don't have that rule enabled:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Get-MailboxJunkEmailConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.Enabled -eq $False}

This is just one example. If you want to display a set of mailboxes based on a setting and can't filter on that setting in the Microsoft 365 admin center, do these steps:

1. Find the mailbox property that corresponds to the setting you're interested in by running the command Get-Mailbox -Identity "<MailboxIdentity" | Select-Object * to list all the properties of a mailbox. <MailboxIdentity> is any unique identifier for the mailbox (name, email address, alias, etc.)

2. Construct your Office 365 PowerShell command like this: Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.<PropertyName> -<ComparisonOperator> <PropertyValue>}