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Following two functions, in Powershell, to manage disconnected (disabled or soft-deleted) mailboxes in Exchange 2010 (non-SP1, but it'll work even on SP1 and above).
The first function is called Get-DisconnectedMailbox and the name is pretty much self explanatory. This function will give you a list of all disconnected mailboxes on each of your mailbox servers. Take a look at the following code:
function Get-DisconnectedMailbox {
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0, Mandatory=$false)]
[System.String]
$Name = '*'
)
$mailboxes = Get-MailboxServer
$mailboxes | %{
$disconn = Get-Mailboxstatistics -Server $_.name | ?{ $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null }
$disconn | ?{$_.displayname -like $Name} |
Select DisplayName,
@{n="StoreMailboxIdentity";e={$_.MailboxGuid}},
Database
}
}
The code above use the DisconnectDate property to identify mailboxes that have been disconnected. The above function use a non-mandatory parameter to filter or select only certain users mailboxes.
Note: If you’ve recently deleted a mailbox, but it’s not showing up when running Get-DisconnectedMailbox, you may need to force Exchange to recognize this by running the Clean-MailboxDatabase cmdlet.
Running the function without specifying a user name will return all disconnected mailboxes:
Disconnected Exchange Mailboxes using PowerShell
To find a particular disconnected mailbox, just type the function name, followed by the users display name. For example, to determine the disconnected mailbox information for a user named Blanca Jacobs you could would run this command:
Get-DisconnectedMailbox “Blanca Jacobs”
Disconnected Exchange Mailboxes using PowerShell
The name parameter will accept wildcards. For example: Get-DisconnectedMailbox M* would give you all disconnected mailboxes starting with the letter “M”.
Purging Disconnected Mailboxes
You purge mailboxes using the Remove-Mailbox cmdlet, specifying the StoreMailboxIdentity and Database for the disconnected mailbox in question.
In an effort to simplify the purging of disconnected mailboxes, I wrote the Remove-DisconnectedMailbox function that is designed to work with Get-DisconnectedMailbox. Here is the code:
function Remove-DisconnectedMailbox {
[CmdletBinding(SupportsShouldProcess=$true)]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true, Mandatory=$true)]
[System.String]
$StoreMailboxIdentity,
[Parameter(Position=1, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true, Mandatory=$true)]
[System.String]
$Database
)
process {
Remove-Mailbox @PSBoundParameters
}
}
This allows you to easily purge all disconnected mailboxes returned from Get-DisconnectedMailbox by piping the output to Remove-DisconnectedMailbox. You can also purge one disconnected mailbox at time, as shown here:
Get-DisconnectedMailbox “Bill Jones” | Remove-DisconnectedMailbox -Confirm:$false
Notice the use of -Confirm:$false in the above command. Since this is an advanced function, we can take advantage of ShouldProcess, which allows functions to use common cmdlet parameters such as -Confirm and -WhatIf.
If you look at the code closely, you’ll notice that this function is essentially a specialized wrapper for the Remove-Mailbox cmdlet. I use splatting with the $PSBoundParameters variable to automatically bind all of the function parameter values to Remove-Mailbox.
Connecting Disconnected Mailboxes
Of course, you can also use the Get-DisconnectedMailbox cmdlet in conjunction with the built-in Connect-Mailbox cmdlet to reconnect a mailbox to a user account.
For example, here’s how you would connect a disconnected mailbox for a user named Bradford Boyer:
Get-DisconnectedMailbox “Bradford Boyer” | %{Connect-Mailbox -Identity $_.StoreMailboxIdentity -Database ‘DB1′ -User ‘contoso\bboyer’ -Alias ‘bboyer’}
Disconnected Exchange Mailboxes using PowerShell
As you can see in the above example, you provide the StoreMailboxIdentity, Database, User and Alias to the Connect-Mailbox cmdlet. If you’d like to do this manually, you can determine the StoreMailboxIdentity of the disconnected mailbox using the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet.
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