Hi all, I have Exchange 2007 standard, recently we have "Disabled" around 30 mail accounts. All the mailboxes have been moved to the "Disconnected Mailbox" section. Before the disabling of the mailboxes the database for "Keep deleted mailboxes for days" was set to 20 days. After disabling the mailboxes i have changed it to 190 days. We have been asked to only disable the accounts and make sure these accounts are never deleted off the server. How can i set the server and ensure they are never deleted? Is there something else we can do rather than leaving them in disconnected section? Is there anyway i can tell when they are set to be deleted? I need to ensure 100% these accounts are never deleted. We do not want to run an export too. Thanks Roger

Why not just disable the AD account and leave Exchange settings alone?Sukh

We did try that but we found remote users running on outlook anywhere could still connect somehow, after some research we found this is the only way! The user accounts have also been disabled. From what i understand its not as easy as Exchange 2003 where you simply disable a windows account. I could be wrong, hopefully you correct me. It would make life so much easier.Roger

I know, what you could do is disable the mailbox features for this to take effect for the user..Sukh

I suppose the questions what is the official and best practice on how to disable a user account and mailbox once a user leaves without deleting the mailbox? The users must not be able to access the account in anyway once complete, and we do not want the account marked for deletion, also bare in mind users can be remote and local users Roger

I'm pretty such it's to disable the mailbox features as this issue was the same for ActiveSync.Sukh

if you disable the user, it does not stop them from receiving emails into the mailbox. if you cannot leave them in the disconnected state, you could try disabling the mailbox features which will not let them access the mailbox. Also you can move all those users objects to a different OU and may be use a powershell script to disable the mailbox features for all the users in that OU.

On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:24:31 +0000, Roger Patel wrote: >I suppose the questions what is the official and best practice on how to disable a user account and mailbox once a user leaves without deleting the mailbox? The users must not be able to access the account in anyway once complete, and we do not want the account marked for deletion, also bare in mind users can be remote and local users If the user is disabled they can't use the account to authenticate. If you disable the account before you move the malbox then the mailbox move will disconnect the user. Why not just change the password on the account? Or (or maybe AND) disable all the access methods on the mailbox (MAPI, POP, IMAP, ActiveSync, HTTPS)? --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP