Inadvertently hard deleted a mailbox?

[Ivan Barros]

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.

[#2]

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!