Do not store old, long-term, or important messages on Office365, but
keep in "local" folders.
BEWARE that when you leave the Uni, ICT will disable your
unikey and you will lose access to Uni email.
BEWARE of Office365
Online Archive
settings: they move messages older than some time into some "Online
Archive". You can access this with Outlook or web interface, or via
davmail and
with Thunderbird
(but maybe not other clients?), and not with IMAP as per
Microsoft documentation,
and not with Apple Mail.
Maybe, change the archiving policy using the web interface:
right-click on (each) email folder and choose
Assign Policy > Achive Policy :
Personal never move to archive (Never).
BEWARE of the Outlook
recall
function: messages recalled and still in your Inbox (or other Office365
folders?), will disappear.
BEWARE that ICT will sometimes delete some (bad? virus?)
messages from your mail folders.
BEWARE of unikey password changes. There may be (was?) an enforced yearly change, and if you change then you may need to re-do the settings in your mail client (gmail or thunderbird or phone etc). (Or if you forget, then you may end up with your account locked after too many bad tries.) Best to leave your unikey password as it was: go through 5 or 10 changes, then back.
Note how "student" email on @uni.sydney.edu.au is outsourced to the same Office365 cloud, though (possibly) with a different login scheme.
Note that with IMAP you can copy messages (in either direction) between Office365 and other folders: try to take advantage of the unlimited storage offered by Office365.
The Uni wants to store data only on servers under trusted jurisdictions, and gmail/google has servers in some Asian countries. The Uni trusts Microsoft (both @sydney and @uni.sydney are really Office365), Mimecast (our spam filter), trusted Symantec (previous spam filter), and say Cloudstor and Dropbox; so far the Uni does not seem to worry about Google Drive. There is a push to have mobile devices (their data, and the passwords they remember) encrypted but that does not seem monitored or enforced.
BEWARE of the Uni Mimecast spam filter, noting that all @maths and @sydney messages received, and any sent by Office365, go through it.
You (probably?) could run davmail on your own machine, with the davmail.mode=O365Interactive setting, so it would handle the authentication prompts, and you could use any IMAP client, see e.g. galileo.phys.virginia.edu/compfac/faq/davmail.html (but this cannot be done with a davmail "server").
Apologies for the verbiage.
Paul Szabo psz@maths.usyd.edu.au 2 Mar 24