We export/import mailboxes of past employees into current employees mailboxes and find that Outlook will 'remind' the current employee of all items that have reminders turned on.  Even for items that have occurred in the past, sometimes 1000s of reminders.   Up till today, just using the "Delete All" option would work, so not a big problem.   Or maybe the /cleanreminders switch would work..  not today..   Had to use MFCMapi to manually delete reminders for calendar items that had been deleted but Outlook just decided to keep 'reminding' the user of.   This issue is 3 months overdue..  Come on Microsoft.

Do others see this?

Is there a better way to handle past employees mail where current employees need to review/apply retention?

Hi,

/cleanreminders will not clean any reminders permanently, it will regenerate all. So, won't hurt to give it shot.

Actually, for those mailboxes after their owners leave the company, you can simply export the content to a pst file, and then access the .pst file in Outlook directly, without importing the content to any current mailbox.

Or if you are using Exchange Online, then you will have a better choice - inactive mailbox which makes it possible for you to preserve the contents of deleted mailboxes:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn144876(v=exchg.150).aspx

Kapaal

Leaving the mailbox data in a .PST format was not attractive to us because Exchange Retention no longer works and items would have to be manually deleted versus having retention automatically delete items as they expire.

I read through the Exchange Online documentation and sounds like the only way a inactive mailbox is accessible is via a discovery search, in our situation a new employee is always assigned the responsibilities of the past employee, so then even by Exchange Online documentation we are back to importing the contents into another person's mailbox, which brings me back to the original problem.  When that data is imported into the new person's mailbox, Outlook reminds them for ALL past events, in my last situation, over 10k reminders.

I do appreciate the response.

Jason

Sorry the info doesn't help too much.

Back to your original question, I actually think this is by design (of course unreasonable) because you're importing appointments into a new system which, in Outlook, triggers the calendar reminders. To get this fixed, probably we need to raise a case to Microsoft via MS support.

For how to handle terminated user mailbox, archive the data into a pst file is the common practice. If you are using Office 365 or interested in upgrading to it, another way to do this is converting them to shared mailbox. (https://www.jonamerica.com/technology/managing-ex-employee-mailboxes-in-microsofts-office-365/)

for more response on how to handle terminated mailbox, you might want to post in Exchange server forum.

Kapaal

• Edited by Kapaal 21 hours 24 minutes ago
• Proposed as answer by Kapaal 5 hours 54 minutes ago

Thanks Kapaal, we also came to the conclusion of using Shared Mailboxes in our on-premise environment, we are discussing it internally.  Appreciate the feedback.

You're welcome, I'm glad I can be of "help" here.

Kapaal