Thursday, February 21, 2008

Disabled mailbox not visible in Disconnected mailbox area

Recently I have seen many posts in forums where people have disconnected an Exchange 2007 mailbox via the EMC and then noticed that the disconnected mailbox did not appear in the EMC Disconnected mailbox area.

I have been searching for causes of this issue and so far have not found one. Although all the MS documentation states that disconnected mailboxes will appear in the disconnected mailbox area automatically this does not seem to be the case in all instances. Under Exchange 2003 it was quite common to run the Mailbox cleanup agent via the ESM in order to force the deleted mailboxes to be marked so that they could be re-connected or purged from the system.

I have not found a GUI based way to do this however so users have had success using the Exchange Management Shell Clean-mailboxdatabase command in order to force this.

This utility seems to run as part of the Database maintenance plan that occurs usually once per day normally in off hours overnight. If you need to manually make the disabled mailbox appear as a disconnected mailbox quickly I would recommend you run the shell command as follows: -

Clean-MailboxDatabase MailboxDatabaseName

Further Information
Clean-MailboxDatabase
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124076(EXCHG.80).aspx

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