In Exchange Online, administrators sometimes consider using the New-MoveRequest cmdlet to move mailboxes within the same tenant or datacenter. While this command exists for historical reasons, Micros...
Published Jan 08, 2026
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Blog Post
Local move requests in Exchange on-prem., hav been advised by Microsoft for a long time, to address all sorts of issues. Every Exchange admin knows that a move requests acts sort of like a cleansing exercise where "corrupt" things are left behind. Many 1000s of issues have been addressed by local moves.
MS Support (with and without assistance from "PG") has advised customers for years to use in-EXO local move requests to address various odd issues. The invention of mailbox shards seems to be what changed here, and the entire product seems to have not been fully looked after to account for those changes.
Local Move Requests in EXO are like Inactive Mailbox recoveries that are no longer possible because of auto-expanding archives.... or because of some other purposed mailbox shards (even when auto-expanding archive hasn't been enabled). These shards came out of nowhere on the public. Meanwhile New-MoveRequest remains available for use today, weeks after this blog post.
This entire topic is a big balogna sandwich.