Mailboxes don’t last forever, and eventually you will want
to remove some from Exchange, usually after users leave the company.
You might want to keep a mailbox for some time after a user leaves so
that its contents are not immediately lost and remain accessible to
other users or even for legal purposes. EAC provides two options for
mailbox removal: you can either disable or remove a mailbox. The words
seem similar, but there’s a huge difference in what happens behind the
scenes.
When you disable a mailbox, Exchange removes all the
properties from the underlying Windows user account in Active Directory
that associates the user with the mailbox. The contents of the mailbox
are purged from its database after the deleted mailbox retention period
expires. When Exchange purges a deleted mailbox from a database, the
only way you can retrieve the mailbox afterward is to retrieve it from
a backup.
The equivalent EMS command to disable a mailbox is:
Disable-Mailbox –Identity 'Redmond, Tony'
When
you remove a mailbox, in addition to marking the mailbox for purging
after its retention period expires, you also remove the Windows user
account from Active Directory. The EMS command EAC uses is:
Remove-Mailbox –Identity 'Redmond, Tony'
As
with disabled mailboxes, Exchange retains the content of removed
mailboxes in their original databases until their retention period
expires. If you want, you can force Exchange to remove the Active
Directory user account and mailbox contents immediately by running the
Remove-StoreMailbox cmdlet. For example:
Remove-StoreMailbox –Identity 'Redmond, Tony'
Before
disabling or removing a mailbox, EAC warns about the consequences of
taking the action. Although the result seems dire, unless you opt to
remove a mailbox permanently, you can always reconnect a mailbox to an
Active Directory account as long as the mailbox is available in the
database. If the mailbox has a personal archive, you are told about
this in the warning message.
Another factor to consider is how to
deal with mailboxes that have been placed on an in-place hold (or the
older litigation hold feature). In these instances, a reason exists for the
mailbox contents to be retained, and if you delete the mailbox, you
might create a problem for the person or persons who requested the
mailbox to be put on hold. Therefore, if a request comes in to remove a
mailbox that is on hold, you should always check with your legal
department, or whatever competent authority exists to authorize
ignoring that a hold is in place, before you process the removal. EAC
won’t allow you to remove or disable a mailbox if a hold is in place.
An
in-place hold might be in effect for multiple mailboxes, including the
one you want to process, so you probably don’t want to remove the hold
from all the targeted mailboxes. In this case, you can disable or
remove the mailbox without affecting the other mailboxes with EMS as
follows:
To disable the mailbox:
Disable-Mailbox –Identity 'Cao, Jun' –IgnoreLegalHold
To remove the mailbox permanently:
Remove-StoreMailbox –Identity 'Cao, Jun'
In both events, EMS prompts you to confirm the action before it proceeds.
