At times when you delete a Mailbox in Exchange 2007, it does not show up in Disconnected Mailbox under Recipient Configuration in the Exchange Management Console (EMC). People do panic if it was a wrong deletion and they want to reconnect the Mailbox, I did too once.
Follow these steps…
- Well the first action item would be to check if the mailbox is available at all or not. Use the Get-Mailboxcmdlet. Once you get the mailbox details, then it means there is some Refresh/Update issue in EMC or Database.
- Bascially you need to run the equivalent of Run Cleanup Agent (of Exchange 2003) to make the dsiconnected mailboxes appear. Run the Clean-MailboxDatabasecmdlet. On successful execution of this command once you goto EMC, you will see the disconnected mailboxes.
Based upon the outcome now you can perform any of the below 2 actions
- Reconnect the Mailbox using Connect-Mailboxcmdlet or via EMC.
- Permanently delete the Mailbox using Remove-Mailbox cmdlet. You got to use the StoreMailboxIdentity parameter of Remove-Mailbox cmdlet. To get the StoreMailboxIdentity parameter use Get-MailboxStatisticscmdlet. Look at 3rd example on Remove-Mailbox examples (at the end).
All’s well that ends well !! Enjoy !