Hey everyone! We're looking for some advice on managing our mailboxes. Right now, we have seven mailboxes used for order entries in our company, but our management wants to consolidate this into a single general mailbox, which I think is a great idea. I've already set up the new general mailbox, but I'm trying to figure out how to disable all the other seven mailboxes while still keeping their email addresses as aliases. I want to avoid the hassle of managing multiple licenses and backups. We definitely can't lose any incoming orders, so any tips, tricks, and to-dos on how to make this transition smoothly would be super appreciated!
3 Answers
You can convert those seven mailboxes into shared mailboxes, which won’t require a license. Alternatively, you could delete them and attach their email addresses as aliases to your new general mailbox. Just a heads up—if you choose to delete, you'll need to use a PowerShell script for a hard delete to free up the email addresses right away instead of waiting 30 days. This way, you won’t run into any issues with losing emails!
Before deleting, you should change the email address of each mailbox first. You'll have the original address free in about five minutes, making it easy to reassign!
I’ve done this before and it's definitely doable. You can give the alias to the new mailbox and also reattach the profile of the old mailbox to the new one. Just double-check if that still works since it's been a while for me, but it's definitely something we've successfully done in the past!
For reusing existing email addresses as aliases, there will be some downtime when you make the changes. If you can't afford any downtime, consider forwarding emails from the old mailboxes to the new one instead! That's an easy workaround while you manage the transition.
Yeah, I thought about forwarding too! But I really want to fully retire the old mailboxes, so I’m okay with a bit of downtime.
So just to clarify, you're saying I should:
1. Do a hard delete using PowerShell?
2. Then reattach those email addresses as aliases to the new mailbox?
Also, don’t worry, we have backups covered on our end!