It shows the relationships between a mailbox-enabled user, its Active Directory attributes and the Exchange mailbox and personal archive (if present).

To better understand why a mailbox can still exist when removing it from a user object, I created the figure below. More on permanent deletions later in this article. Note: The statements above are valid given that you did not perform a permanent removal of the mailbox, in which case the mailbox will be removed from the database immediately. During the maintenance cycle, the mailbox will be marked for removal. The mailbox is also said to be ‘orphaned’ because it has no associations with a user object. What really happens when you disable a mailbox is that the mailbox is disassociated from the related user object in Active Directory by removing the user object’s Exchange attributes. In Exchange 2010 (20 as well) we have the option to “remove” the mailbox of a mailbox user (remove is quoted, because the action itself is called Disable). I will also give attention to the personal archive element found new in Exchange 2010. In this article I would like to explain the procedures involved mailbox recovery, disconnecting or connecting mailboxes to user objects, mailbox retention. For instance, personal archives can have different quota settings than regular mailboxes. In reality, as you probably know, the personal archive in Exchange 2010 is a special kind of mailbox which gets special treatment. With Exchange 2010 there are some additions to this story because of personal archives. This may prove valuable after accidental deletions or when converting to, or from, a linked mailbox account, where the user accounts resides in one forest and the Exchange mailbox in another forest. Within the retention period, the mailbox can be recovered by reconnecting it to the same or a different user object that has no mailbox connected to it. This provided new capabilities for recovering deleted mailboxes, by accident or on purpose. In Exchange 2000, the mailbox retention period was introduced. With Exchange 5.5 server you had to restore the entire mailbox store on a recovery server and then had to perform an export and import exercise using PST files and a newly created mailbox. It is easy, for example, to forget how tiresome it used to be to recover deleted mailboxes.

Connecting the Disconnected in Exchange 2010 - Simple TalkĪfter working with recent versions of Exchange server, you might forget what life was like back in the early days of Exchange. You quickly get accustomed to functionality as if it were always there.

Exchange 2013 remove mailbox