Quite a few months ago I discovered that I had several mailboxes that were Linked instead of User Mailboxes. For whatever reason, when I migrated my users over from Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 decided that a bunch of them needed to be Linked Mailboxes instead of User Mailboxes. I read this forum thread that said it was possibly due to an earlier migration from AD 2000 to AD 2003 (which I have done in my environment). Initially I didn't think this was a big deal, and I didn't see any huge differences between a Linked Mailbox and a User Mailbox, until I had to do some delegation. I was not able to let one of my users send on behalf of another user while they were both Linked.
After much digging and finding LOTS of articles (and TechNet Posts) on How to Convert a User Mailbox to a Linked Mailbox which was exactly opposite of what I wanted to do, I was losing hope. Then I found a couple of posts on Experts Exchange that dealt with this issue, but I'm not sure as to the legality of linking to a pay service, and those didn't 100% resolve my problem anyway, but I was getting closer. I decided to work through the problem on my own and figure this out. So, I promptly right clicked on my account and clicked "Disable". When I did that, I got a warning message:
Reading this message you can see that it says NOTHING about losing the actual mailbox, just marking it for deletion. I thought I was pretty safe, so I clicked "Yes". I quickly bounced over to my "Disconnected Mailboxes" in the Recipient Configuration section of EMC 2007…. refreshed…. and….. nothing. Waited, and refreshed again….. nothing. At this point, I'm starting to worry that my mailbox is gone. I flip over to my Backup Exec server and start a restore. Two hours later, my restore isn't complete and my mailbox is still not showing up in Disconnected Mailboxes. My wife and I have plans to go out of town for the weekend, so I create a new blank mailbox so I won't bounce all weekend and figure I'll fix it Monday.
On Monday, my old Mailbox is happily sitting in the "Disconnected Mailbox" section of ESM. This inspires me to figure out why it wasn't there on Friday. After Googling "Refresh Disconnected Mailbox" I found this blog by MSMVP Anderson Patricio. Now I have the missing piece so that I can perform this process mostly through the GUI. The down and dirty way to fix this problem is to disable, and re-connect to the User.
I'll outline the manual process:
Disable Mailbox (Right Click the mailbox you want to disconnect, and select Disable). This does exactly what the above warning message says it will do and remove all Exchange Properties WITHOUT deleting the mailbox.
Wait about 60 seconds and then run the following Exchange Management Shell command to refresh the "Disconnected Mailbox" list within the GUI (Thanks Mr. Patricio!).
Clean-MailboxDatabase <mailbox database name>
- Connect the mailbox back to its original account (Right Click the disconnected mailbox, select "Connect")
Steps 1 and 3 can be done from the GUI. Step 2 can too but it takes a whole lot longer to re-schedule your maintenance for one instance than it does to run the command to kick this off. Here is the command:
Clean-MailboxDatabase -Identity "Database Name" (where "Database Name" is the name of the database the user was in when you disabled them which we took note of in step one.)
I don't think you need the quotes around the "Database Name" if you don't have any spaces in the name, but all of my databases have spaces so I couldn't test this theory.
Now, let's see how this works in Exchange Management Shell (compliments of my colleague Robert Durkin). Now I'll step through the EMS commands needed to perform this task:
The first command retrieves the pertinent information we will need to run the remaining commands.
Get-Mailbox -Identity UserName |FL DisplayName,Database,RecipientTypeDetails
The results should look something like this:
DisplayName : Durkin, Robert
Database : ServerName\First Storage Group\Database Name
RecipientType : LinkedMailbox
The second command disables the mailbox. This one is very straightforward.
Disable-Mailbox –Identity UserName
The disable command is going to ask you for confirmation:
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Disabling Mailbox "RDurkin" will remove the Exchange properties from the
Windows user object and mark the mailbox in the database for removal.
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help
(default is "Y"):
The third command re-connects the mailbox. Although this third command does not specify that we're reconnecting as a User Mailbox vice a Linked Mailbox, every time I have performed this task via the EMS it successfully connects the mailbox as User Mailbox. If anyone finds anything differently, please let me know so I can do additional testing and update this post.
Connect-Mailbox –Identity "Name, User" –Alias UserName –Database "Database Name"
This command is also going to require a confirmation. It will look something like this:
Do you want to connect this mailbox to user "domain.com/OU/OU2/Durkin, Robert"
with the alias "RDurkin"?
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help
(default is "Y"):
Once you confirm, you will get the following warning in yellow text:
WARNING: The operation completed successfully but the change will not become
effective until Active Directory replication occurs.
If you would like to verify your changes, you can re-run the first command:
Get-Mailbox -Identity rdurkin |FL DisplayName,Database,RecipientTypeDetails
DisplayName : Durkin, Robert
Database : ServerName\First Storage Group\Database Name
RecipientTypeDetails : UserMailbox
* Take note of the database the user's mailbox is in that was returned with the first command (this is VERY important especially if you're in a large environment). Without the correct Database Information, you may find yourself guessing, which could take some time. It is also important that you use either the GUID of the mailbox, Display Name, or LegacyExchangeDN to identify your user with the –Identity switch in the "Connect-Mailbox" command. I used the Display Name in the examples above. The Connect-Mailbox command does not accept the same parameters that Get and Disable-Mailbox commands use like Alias or AD User ID.
* Also note, that you will lose all alias email addresses when you disconnect and reconnect a mailbox.
Check out Andy Grogan's post on an alternate method of performing this task. Take special note of his summary. The permission issues that cause these accounts to show up as linked in the first place could need to be cleaned up. A few of my users exhibited OWA problems right away which were attributed to legacy permissions, so I scrubbed all of my users before I tackled the conversion problem.