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Deleting and reconnecting Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes

There's a subtle difference between a deleted Exchange Server 2007 mailbox and a disconnected mailbox. Learn how to reconnect a deleted Exchange mailbox.

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This is part 3 from "Creating and managing recipients in Exchange Server 2007," excerpted from Chapter 3 of the book Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: A Beginner's Guide, written by Nick Cavalancia and published by The McGraw-Hill Companies, copyright 2008.

Deleting a mailbox is a rather simple task in Exchange 2007: choose the mailbox, select Remove from the action pane, and it's gone. The opportunity exists, though, to reassociate the "deleted" mailbox (which is actually in a "disconnected" state and won't be deleted immediately) with another existing user account in Active Directory. First, the issue of deleted versus disconnected: Each mailbox database has its own settings on how long to retain deleted mailboxes, as well as a setting on whether to wait for a backup before deleting mailboxes. You can read more on this in Chapter 5.

The process of recovering a mailbox involves selecting the "deleted" mailbox (I put deleted in quotes, as it isn't really deleted until Exchange deems it so) and connecting it to an existing Active Directory user account that currently does not have a mailbox. Figure 3-26 shows the disconnected mailbox object in the Exchange Management Console.

Figure 3-26. Navigating to reconnect mailboxes. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Selecting the mailbox and choosing Connect from the action pane starts the Connect Mailbox Wizard, shown in Figure 3-27. You can choose the type of mailbox the reconnected mailbox will be. The process is similar to creating a new mailbox, with the only difference being that the mailbox dataset already exists and you need to select the existing user or match it to an alias, as shown in Figure 3-28.

Figure 3-27. Reconnecting via the Connect Mailbox Wizard. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Figure 3-28. Selecting the existing user in the Connect Mailbox Wizard. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Beginner's Guide

Click here for the chapter download or purchase the book here.

This was last published in November 2008

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