Thursday, January 31, 2008

Deleting an Exchange Mailbox

I was asked today to delete the mailbox for a user who has recently left the company. Having never deleted a mailbox before, I thought it best to at least read up on it first before jumping right in and hitting the delete key.

A quick search brought me to a site I have used in the past to help with Exchange questions that I have had. Armed with instructions and pictures I was able to quickly delete the users mailbox.

We often have to change passwords around here, so I am very familiar with the ADUC (Active Directory Users and Computers) MMC, so that is how I accessed the Exchange delete tool. Please note that what follows is a very quick fly-by for my own record keeping. If you are going to delete anything from your Exchange environment, please do your homework. Read books, check out Microsoft's Exchange Support Pages, and by all means, talk to someone else who has been doing Exchange Administration for a while.

What I did after finding my user in the OU was to right click on the username, from that menu I chose "Exchange Tasks", from the pop-up menu choose Delete Mailbox and follow the prompts. It was that simple.

And, just in case you do this all by mistake, there are instructions on the post above as well as additional links for recovering deleted mailboxes.