Extract deleted user account mailbox from Exchange 2003

[Sheridan]

We've got an Exchange 2003 mail server here and I would like to export a deleted account's mailbox. Using exmerge doesn't show the account as it has been removed from AD, but you can still see the mailbox in the System manager mailboxs list - so it hasn't been purged yet (the account was only deleted a week or so ago)

 

Is there any easy way to do this? I don't want to spend too much time on it!

[Oaktech]

can you make a new non mail enabled user and reconnect the orphaned mail box by going through to mailboxes under the storage group and mailbox store, right clicking and reconnect. Then open it up as the user and PST it?

[Sheridan]

I'm not sure why, but Reconnect and Purge on the users mailbox are both greyed out - as if the account was still active.

[Oaktech]

thats weird...

 

Is it possible that they haven't picked up that they are orphaned yet?

could this article help?

 

exchange 2003 - reconnect mailbox to user

[Sheridan]

Its looks like you were spot on @Oaktech - after waiting a few more hours I could reconnect to the mailbox and export it!

 

Cheers for that!

[SYNACK]

If you ever need to again you can speed up the process by right clicking the mailbox store and telling it to run the mailbox cleanup agent which will pitch our the orphaned ones immediately.

[Sheridan]

I ran the cleanup agent a few hours after deleting the user accounts, but there still seems to have quite a long delay (24 hours or more)

 

Odd - maybe our Exchange 2003 server is trying to tell us to upgrade to 2010!

[2097]

This *may* have worked .. Unsure though if the ad accounts been deleted

 

Exporting a Exchange 2007 Mailbox into PST format