School Leavers: Can I turn mailbox users into mailcontacts? In bulk?
Hi, It's the end of the school year and we've hundreds of leavers, each with their own school email address (firstname.lastname@myschool.ORG) Instead of just deleting their email accounts with their Active Directory accounts I'd like to forward messages to a new service hosted elsewhere (firstname.lastname@myschool.COM) We're hoping this will allow them to keep in touch with one another, and us with them, and that further emails sent to their school account will be forwarded and answered from their new service. Using Exchange2007, I believe we do this by creating a mail contact firstname.lastname@myschool.ORG then for each forwarding mail to firstname.lastname@myschool.COM Must I delete the ADaccount and mailbox before re-creating them as mail contacts? Or can I turn one into the other? If so, can I script this? Does anyone have experience of trying to achieve the same ends by other means? Thanks for the help! PRJ
June 22nd, 2011 2:11pm

You do need to delete their accounts so you might as well just go ahead and do that. You cant have endless AD accounts just hanging out there for years; its a security risk if nothing else. Step one would be to export all of the details out to CSV. Use CSVDE for that purpose. Once you have got that export with names and addresses you can delete the accounts and mailboxes. Then you can go ahead and manipulate that CSV file to change user to contact and reimport it so that you get a load of mail enabled contacts instead of mailbox enabled accounts. Thats far safer and the right way of dong things. Do some research (go to computerperformance.co.uk) for CSVDE advice and search other sites. Its an easy tool and the CSV is easy to read and edit. "PRJ-HH" wrote in message news:8f848275-97c4-4fa1-a216-fe071036f455... Hi, It's the end of the school year and we've hundreds of leavers, each with their own school email address (firstname.lastname@myschool.ORG) Instead of just deleting their email accounts with their Active Directory accounts I'd like to forward messages to a new service hosted elsewhere (firstname.lastname@myschool.COM) We're hoping this will allow them to keep in touch with one another, and us with them, and that further emails sent to their school account will be forwarded and answered from their new service. Using Exchange2007, I believe we do this by creating a mail contact firstname.lastname@myschool.ORG then for each forwarding mail to firstname.lastname@myschool.COM Must I delete the ADaccount and mailbox before re-creating them as mail contacts? Or can I turn one into the other? If so, can I script this? Does anyone have experience of trying to achieve the same ends by other means? Thanks for the help! PRJ Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 22nd, 2011 3:25pm

Agree with Mark. And similar post you can refer to: Convert Contacts to User Mailboxes http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/exchangesvradmin/thread/d66f5e53-0627-4376-9863-07cb137ec1cb/Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
June 24th, 2011 5:40am

Hi PRJ, Any updates?Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 28th, 2011 4:34am

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics