Recovering Deleted Mailboxes

Tasks related to deleting mailboxes are covered in Chapter 7, "User and Contact Administration," in the "Deleting Mailboxes from User Accounts" and "Deleting User Accounts and Their Mailboxes" sections. When you delete a mailbox from a user account, the mailbox is retained as a disconnected mailbox according to the mailbox retention setting. You can reconnect the mailbox to the original user account or another user account, if necessary. When you delete a user account and the related mailbox, the mailbox is retained as a disconnected mailbox according to the mailbox retention setting. You can connect the mailbox to an existing user account, if necessary.

To recover a deleted mailbox, complete the following steps:

1. In Exchange Management Console, expand the Recipient Configuration node, and then select the related Disconnected Mailbox node.

2. Deleted mailboxes are listed by the mailbox user's display name, storage group, and mailbox database. Right-click the deleted mailbox you want to recover, and then select Connect. This starts the Connect Mailbox wizard.

   Note 

   Deleted mailboxes aren't necessarily marked as such immediately. It may take 15 minutes to an hour before the mailbox is marked as deleted and listed accordingly.

3. On the Introduction page, select the type of mailbox you are recovering, and then click Next. The available options are: User Mailbox, Room Mailbox, Equipment Mailbox, and Linked Mailbox.

4. On the Mailbox Settings page, select Existing User, and then click Browse. Use the Select User dialog box to select the user account with which you want to associate the mailbox, and then click OK. You can connect a disconnected mail-box to a user account only if the account doesn't already have a mailbox associated with it.

   Note 

   If you previously removed the mailbox, rather than disabling it, the user account associated with the mailbox was deleted as well. Because each user account has a unique security identifier associated with it, you can't simply recreate the user account to get back the same set of permissions and privileges. That said, however, if you want to connect the mailbox to a user account with the same name you can do this by recreating the account in Active Directory Users And Computers. The account will then be available when you select Existing User and click Browse.

5. The Exchange alias is set to the logon name by default. You can change this value by entering a new alias. The Exchange alias is used to set the user's e-mail address.

6. Click Next, and then click Connect.

You can use the connect-Mailbox cmdlet to perform the same task following the syntax shown in Sample 12-4.

Sample 12-4: connect-Mailbox cmdlet syntax and usage

 Syntax connect-Mailbox -Identity 'OrigMailboxIdentity' -Database  'DatabaseIdentity'  -User 'NewUserIdentity'  -Alias 'ExchangeAlias' Usage connect-Mailbox -Identity 'Molly Dempsey'  -Database 'CORPSVR127\First Storage Group\Accounting DB'  -User 'CPANDL\mollyd'  -Alias 'mollyd' 

Recovering Deleted Items from Mailbox Databases

You can recover deleted items from mailbox databases as long as you've set a deleted item retention period for the database from which the items were deleted and the retention period hasn't expired. If both of these are the case, you can recover deleted items from mailbox databases by completing the following steps:

1. Log on as the user who deleted the message, and then start Outlook.

2. Click Deleted Items, and then, from the Tools menu, select Recover Deleted Items. The Recover Deleted Items From dialog box appears.

3. Select the items you want to recover, and then click Recover Selected Items.