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Lefty's avatar
Lefty
Copper Contributor
Jan 17, 2025

Mismatch between exchange recipients list and mailboxes set up in 365 Admin?

I'm a little new to 365 administration, so please excuse me if I am being a little thick here.

I am looking at a 365 Tenant, there are around 100 licensed users (and therefore around 100 mailboxes allocated), but if I go to exchange admin and look at recipients, there are only 40, including shared mailboxes.

My first thought was that perhaps only mailboxes that had actually been used were listed, but I checked one of the "missing" mailboxes in the 365 admin centre and apparently they have 8 Gigabytes of emails in that mailbox.

Indeed the same user has three accounts, each with their own license and mailbox (don't ask why, I didn't set this up), I see two of them in the recipients list in Exchange admin.

What am I missing?

  • ABHB's avatar
    ABHB
    Copper Contributor

    I also have been wondering if it's something on my browser but good to know that I am not the only one. It worked fine last year. I don't even have pages shown. But if I search the mailbox I can access it. This is very annoying when trying to do bulk changes to mailboxes.

    • ABHB's avatar
      ABHB
      Copper Contributor

      Just a day after I posted this, it's working again for me. How is it for everyone else?

  • LukeRebirth's avatar
    LukeRebirth
    Copper Contributor

    Hi Lefty, I have the same or at least a similar error, where I can only see 40 out of over 300 user and shared mailboxes in no particular order.
    I am currently assuming that it is just a appearance error from the Exchange Online Admin Center as it is displayed correctly in the incognito browser and via other browsers with the same login data.
    Can you successfully search for the other mailboxes in the Exchange Admin Center?

    • Murof's avatar
      Murof
      Copper Contributor

      I have the same problem too.  I can only see 40 mailboxes in the Exchange Admin view, but can see all users in O365 Admin.  I can find the users by searching for them.  I only noticed this a couple of days ago.

      If I use Google Chrome I can see all the mailboxes, but using Microsoft Edge I can only see 40.  I have tried to clear out the cache etc but it doesn't make a difference.  Even logging in a another user with admin permissions gives the same result.

      • Murof's avatar
        Murof
        Copper Contributor

        Just wanted to clarify that it did work in Google Chrome for a while, but stopped working once the browser was closed and restarted.  Now I can still only see 40 mailboxes again in the main view.

    • Lefty's avatar
      Lefty
      Copper Contributor

      Hi Luke,
      Yes, searches work fine, and one time I visited the page and it actually showed all the mailboxes (120 or so), but then later it went back to the 40.

      • LukeRebirth's avatar
        LukeRebirth
        Copper Contributor

        Hello Lefty,
        Yes, it's not entirely clear to me how this happens, yesterday it worked for me but a colleague had the problem, today again only for me.
        At the moment I don't think there are any productiv malfunction other than the fact that you can't find all the mailboxes by scrolling.

  • Did you check under Resources in the Exchange Admin Center? Not all mailbox types are shown under the Mailboxes page, and there can be some scenarios in which assigning a license to a user does not result in provisioning a mailbox. But if you are seeing mailbox usage data in the M365 Admin center, likely there is a mailbox indeed, which we can confirm via PowerShell. Connect to ExO PowerShell first, then run the following cmdlet:

    Get-Recipient email address removed for privacy reasons | select DisplayName,PrimarySmtpAddress,RecipientTypeDetails

    This should find any matching objects in Exchange Online, and also give you the type of mailbox/recipient. If you are not getting any results, try running the cmdlet again, this time providing the UserPrincipalName as input. If not getting any matches again, we might have to check your permissions.

    • MatthewFoster50's avatar
      MatthewFoster50
      Copper Contributor

      That's not the issue, it wouldn't vary between browsers if it was. 

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