Steps to Recreate Exchange Mailbox/user

Recreating Exchange Mailbox is one of the nightmare for the Exchange administrator, if few things are not taken care. On this blog I am sharing my knowledge on how we can recreate a user without making impact on the mail flow for that user.

There might be the different cause due to which Mailboxes get corrupt. Like mismatch on log, corruption on database or after the repair of the of the corrupted database.

Symptoms of Corrupted Mailboxes

So how do I find the symptoms of corrupted Exchange Mailboxes.

1. Users might have issue on opening previous emails which has been already downloaded on Outlook.
2. Might be have been issue while sending email.
3. Office Outlook not getting updated or might have an issue on ActiveSync too.
4. Not able to open Outlook Web App.
5. Not able to move Mailboxes from one Database to another due to a lot of corrupted items.

Repairing Mailbox

Now how do we proceed to make these corrupted mailboxes healthy. First of all, we proceed ahead with the repair command line on Exchange PowerShell as of below.

1. To Create Mailbox repair request we can check with ‘New-MailboxRepairRequest‘

   To Repair the Mailbox

   New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox <MailboxName> -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder -DetectOnly

   To Repair the Database

   New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database <DatabaseName> -CorruptionType AggregateCounts

For detail you can visit this link: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625226(v=exchg.160).aspx#Parameters
2. To check the status of Mailbox repair request ‘Get-MailboxRepairRequest’

Recreating Mailbox

But still if Mailbox does not get fix and has been corrupted severely the next and only option is to re-create a mailbox. So, here is the steps we need to follow before re-creating the mailbox. If these steps are not followed and you simply re-create a mailbox you might find these kinds of issue while sending email to these users.

Error: IMCEAEX-_o=pdhewaju_ou=Exchange+20Administrative+20Group+20+28FYDIBOHF23SPDLT+29_cn=Recipients_cn=8d65bce53b3244e488e5e1af658d3b3e-blog@pdhewaju.com.np Remote Server returned ‘550 5.1.11 RESOLVER.ADR.ExRecipNotFound; Recipient not found by Exchange Legacy encapsulated email address lookup’

Get-Mailbox -Identity <username> |fl name, Legacy*

For every mailbox created, it will have LegacyExchangeDN

2. Backup the email of the mailbox using below cmdlet

New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox <UserName> -FilePath \\UNCPath\filename.pst

To check the status of ExportRequest use below cmdlet.

Get-MailboxExportRequest

3. Disable the Mailbox, do not delete it.

4. Now recreate the Mailbox, while recreating mailbox add LegacyExchangeDN as x500 SMTP address.

5. Now you need to import the mailbox by using below cmdlet

New-MailboxImportRequest -Mailbox <UserName> -FilePath \\UNCPath\filename.pst

To check the status of ImportRequest use below cmdlet.

Get-MailboxImportRequest

I hope this method will help you to recreate a mailbox without any loss of email as well the mailflow.