tech blog

So there is a time in every organization where an employee who was involved in everything leaves. He/She was an integral part of many different projects and it comes time to remove them from the Exchange Organization.

You done all the standard stuff that you have been required to by various laws and regulations. You have archived the users mail. You have made sure that all of their files are backed up and stored safely. Before you hit Remove Mailbox in the Exchange Management Console let me tell you a little story about disconnected mailboxes.

Disconnected Mailbox Storage is the Recycle Bin for Exchange Organizations. It allows the Exchange System Administrator to go “Oh Crap we still needed that”. When you click remove mailbox it doesn’t actually remove the mailbox. It just moves the mailbox to the ‘Disconnected Mailboxes Grouping’ the time that Exchange holds the mailbox before permanently deleting the mailbox is 30 days. For most users this works out perfectly.

There is however a time and a place where you will want to remove all instances of that user from your Exchange organization. This scenario would be like the one I described above. Where the user who is being removed was receiving meeting requests for the Project Manager and answering vacation emails for the Vice President but never removed the delegation. If you simply remove the mailbox the delegations will remain and cause bounced email for every meeting request. To solve this problem there is a very simple Exchange Powershell Command that goes like this:

Remove-Mailbox -Identity contoso\john -Permanent $true

Exchange Shell will then ask if you want to remove associations. The answer to that question is Yes to all.

The powershell command will complete and it will be like the mailbox was never in the Exchange Organization.