Forum Discussion
Inadvertently hard deleted a mailbox?
Greetings kind folks,
The initial objective was to activate a litigation hold on a mailbox, but since the mailbox was in a softdeleted state, I went this way:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt761731(v=exchg.150).aspx
I ended up successfully enabling an in-place hold, and only moments later did I realize that what I really wanted was a litigation hold (looking retrospectively, I should have just kept the in-place hold as it was and go about my business ), so I went ahead and canceled the in-place hold and deleted the mailbox search.
The sad reality is that now the mailbox seems to be neither softdeleted or inactive...just nowhere to be found.
I now realize that I should have just kept it simple by reactivating the account, and subsequently the mailbox would become active again and it would just be necessary to enable the litigation hold. ( Set-Mailbox %emailaddress% -LitigationHoldEnabled $true)
Should I register a ticket with Microsoft?
If I export a list of all the inactive and softdeleted mailboxes on my tenant, will somehow the affected mailbox show up to be "orphaned" somehow?
Any ideias are welcome, many thanks to anyone who can share their opinion on this.
Unfortunately, once you released the hold that was keeping your mailbox in an inactive state, you made it eligible for hard deletion (permanent and irrecoverable removal). It's impossible for Microsoft support to say when a mailbox will disappear because that depends on background processes running on the mailbox server where the active copy of the database holding the mailbox is. I am afraid you are toast. Or rather, your mailbox has made its way to the great byte wastebasket in the sky...
20 Replies
UPDATE!
After re-licensing the user, the mailbox came back to life!
I´m still astonished on this (I had really given up hope), but it seems somehow the mailbox information was kept either on the cloud, or on the onprem exchange server.
It´s a hybrid enviroment, I forgot to mention that! A crucial piece of information, it seems?
Regards!
I think you've just illustrated the problems of trying to debug problems in a forum like this. Without being able to run PowerShell inside your tenant, it's hard to form a full picture of what's going on.
Deleted mailboxes are kept in a soft-deleted state for 30 days. During this time they can be automatically reattached to an account if you assign that account an Exchange Online license. It looks as if the mailbox was not deleted recently, so it was available to be reattached (GUIDs connect the mailbox to the account). It's kind of interesting that Microsoft support wasn't able to find this.
Hey Tony,
I understood that, I was just doing my best effort by using all the available resources in solving this issue.
The internal escalation approach within my company was fortunately not discarded (the proof that two people can look at a problem with a different perspective is adamant in this situation).
"Deleted mailboxes are kept in a soft-deleted state for 30 days. During this time they can be automatically reattached to an account if you assign that account an Exchange Online license. It looks as if the mailbox was not deleted recently, so it was available to be reattached (GUIDs connect the mailbox to the account)"
This is where things get curious. We triple-checked and fact of the matter is, the mailbox was not found in a soft deleted state. The command:
Get-Mailbox -SoftDeletedMailbox -Resultsize unlimited | FL Name,WhenSoftDeleted,DistinguishedName,ExchangeGuid,PrimarySmtpAddress | export-csv c:\temp\softdeletedmailboxes.csv
Did not show the affected mailbox.
Neither did this one:
Get-Mailbox -InactiveMailboxOnly -resultsize unlimited | FL Name,DistinguishedName,ExchangeGuid,PrimarySmtpAddress | export-csv c:\temp\inactivemailboxes.csv
We also checked for deleted mailboxes via Exchange online GUI.
What gives?
Thanks!
Quick update: turns out MS support was quite useless in this matter. They told me to follow a scripted guide and quite simply if the mailbox was not found in a softdeleted state there was nothing they could do.
May this serve as a hard learned lesson for me, and a heads up for anyone who is reading this in the future..
Unfortunately, once you released the hold that was keeping your mailbox in an inactive state, you made it eligible for hard deletion (permanent and irrecoverable removal). It's impossible for Microsoft support to say when a mailbox will disappear because that depends on background processes running on the mailbox server where the active copy of the database holding the mailbox is. I am afraid you are toast. Or rather, your mailbox has made its way to the great byte wastebasket in the sky...
I also thought that would be my only resort. Thanks!
