A better way to recover a mailbox
Published Jan 13 2015 03:03 PM 89.9K Views

Update 09/15/2016: We have removed the content of this blog post because the relevant content has now been migrated to TechNet. Please go here for the latest information on this subject.

 
24 Comments
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Is this command available to all tenants in Office 365? I am global admin with Organization Management role however I could not run the command New-MailboxRestoreRequest : The term 'New-MailboxRestoreRequest' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet,

function

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Hi, nice write. Glad you are recommending this as I work exactly that way already :) But maybe allow me to suggest a vital enhancement: In order to restore the deleted mailbox so that users won´t recognize that there is a new mailbox acting as the old

one: Do not only takeover the SMTP address(es), also take over the "old" LegacyExchangeDN as X400 Alias address to the new mailbox (leave that LegacyDN as is). This will suppress NDR messages when other users who wrote to that deleted mailbox before and/or

have that mailbox in their contacts folder.

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To repair inaccessible exchange server mailbox you can use Eseutil and Isinteg, It provide soft and hard database recovery, If you want to use third party software then try edb repair software.

http://www.edbtoliveexchange.edbpst.net

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EDB recovery software is an advance and effective third party software, it can easily restore mailbox folders- Inbox, Outbox, Sent items, Journals, Notes, Task, Draft etc. The software can fix edb files error and database corruption issue.

http://www.exchangeserver.recoveryfiles.org/

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Exchange edb repair software is capable to instantly restore mailbox from corrupt exchange server database public folder. The software easily fix exchange server corruption issue and convert corrupt edb to pst format.

http://www.edb2pst.net/

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The "new" Approach provides a much better/easier way to recover mailboxes. Thanks.
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@Jeff - sorry for the delay I had to test it to verify, You can only perform the restore using the MailboxRstoreRequest cmdlet to one mailbox, subsequent restore request of the same soft deleted mailbox to other active mailboxes fail
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I may be wrong on this but I'm pretty sure that having the AD Recycle Bin enabled stopped DirSync from being able to preform the sync - at least that was the impression i got when using OnRamp for my test environment
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@jpalarchio - The approach documented in this blog will work for inactive mailboxes as well. Inactive Mailboxes should show up in a similar way that soft deleted mailboxes do.
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Great article. Any additional notes you can provide around restore options for "inactive mailboxes" (mailboxes on litigation hold or IPH where the user has since been deleted)?
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Good stuff, Tim.


What happens to the soft deleted mailbox after the New-MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet is run? Is it empty? Could it be merged again to another mailbox?

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Thanks for the info, so what is the solution if the mailbox is hard-deleted AND the method involving "New-Mailbox –RemovedMailbox" is not available?
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What if the source mailbox had LitigationHold or InPlace Hold enabled ?

What about RMS protected messages ?

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@jpalarchio when you have an inactive mailbox it will essentially be in a soft deleted state meaning the steps similar to what is documented in this post will work for recovering the data
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This is great! One issue that often occurs as part of accidental deletions is that NDRs start to surface because other users have the deleted users legacyExchangeDN address in their Outlook NK2 file, so sending with autocomplete attempts a delivery to

the non-existing recipient. Would be great to see documented guidelines on that as well as part of this updated approach. Thanks!

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Is this New-MailboxRestoreRequest going to perform the proper write-backs to the on-premises MailUser object and correctly tag it as a RemoteMailboxUser, or do we still need to run Enable-RemoteMailbox ourselves?
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Thanks for the information, but what is the solution when the mailbox is hard deleted and Get-RemovedMailbox is disabled?
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You can utilize inbuilt utility to repair Exchange EDB file. But inbuilt utility can only be work in minor corruption. If your Exchange EDB file is highly corrupted then you have to utilize a third party tool "Exchange EDB Repair Software" can easily repair

your corrupted, damaged, deleted, inaccessible etc EDB files. Try its DEMO Version from here: -

http://www.outlookemails.net/repair/edb/

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Kindly help me to get the Back up my Mail Data from Outlook.com because i unable to access my Domain/Admin page where we can ADD/DELETE the mail ID. Thanks in Advance for your kind assistance. Awaiting your reply soon. Thanks, Moosa
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Pls help to migrate my Mails from Outlook to Yahoo which are under single domain name.
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Thanks Tim, good article.

My2cents

- It didn't failed when I have tried to merge the same soft deleted mailbox to another mailbox

- You must add -AllowLegacyDNMismatch if you merge to a new account

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Why is my question being filtered? Is that so scary for you to approve
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Is this commandlet available to all the tenants in Office 365?

New-MailboxRestoreRequest : The term 'New-MailboxRestoreRequest' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function. I am a global admin with Organization Management permission.

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Unfortunately this change stepped on a an important process for our Hybrid environment. We use Get-RemovedMailbox and New-Mailbox -RemovedMailbox in order to mimic the on-prem behavior of reattaching a disconnected mailbox to another user. We sometimes

have identity provisioning conflicts and other issues arise where this function is invaluable. Having to merge mailboxes rather than just reattaching them is less desirable in these cases. Does the exchange online team have any plans to allow a soft deleted

mailbox to just be 'attached' to another user rather than merged? Either that or return some similar functionality like Get-RemovedMailbox? How are we to deal with mailboxes that are removed after a Remove-MSOLUser -RemoveFromReycleBin?

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