Hey everyone! I'm in a bit of a pickle. I'm not an Exchange expert, and unfortunately, our go-to guy left us recently. I've been put in charge of fixing an issue with our disabled mailboxes. We use AD Manager to disable inactive accounts, which has worked fine for years. But recently, after some changes were made to the user modify template, around 150 user mailboxes were disabled, and now we need to restore them all due to our auditing requirements for the next 10+ years.
I can see the disabled accounts in the Exchange Admin Center, but when I try to connect them, Exchange doesn't recognize the accounts anymore. I'm currently using the Exchange Management Shell to connect each mailbox manually, which involves altering commands for several different databases, and it's become a real hassle. Plus, I have to enable the AD accounts first just to link them back, making it even more time-consuming.
Is there a more efficient way to bulk restore these mailboxes? It seems ridiculous that this small action has turned into so much work!
3 Answers
Ugh, sounds like a frustrating situation! I totally get the pain of restoring one by one. It’s great that your team is trying to help by enabling accounts and adding aliases back in, but it's definitely creating a mess. If these accounts aren't in a different Organizational Unit (OU), check if they're synced with Entra Connect. Sometimes, that can cause visibility issues. Are you working on an on-prem Exchange or Exchange Online?
There’s actually a script that can help gather all the disabled mailboxes based on their databases. You can find it on Microsoft’s site. It might save you a lot of time since you could batch process them instead of manually linking each one. I know it’s a hassle to input all the fields, but automating that part might make things easier!
Good luck! I'm probably not the best source for quick solutions here, but sounds like it's gonna be a long process even with scripts. It's definitely worth refining your approach to avoid repetitive tasks. Hang in there!
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