Using the Exchange Mailbox Recovery Center

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For each disconnected mailbox in a Microsoft® Exchange Server database, the Mailbox Recovery Wizard suggests a matching Active Directory® directory service user account that is the most likely previous owner of the mailbox. The Mailbox Recovery Center can be useful in cases where you have already used the Remove Exchange Attributes task or the Delete Mailbox task to disconnect multiple mailboxes, and you now want to reconnect the mailboxes to their previous owners.

One scenario where this action may be required is after you restore an Exchange database to a different server or storage group. Because the homeMDB attribute links an Active Directory user account to a specific database in a specific storage group on a specific server, all existing mailboxes in a moved database will be in a disconnected state. The Mailbox Recovery Center can set the appropriate Active Directory attributes to link all disconnected mailboxes to their previous owning accounts.

Important

Using the Create Mailbox task does not re-link an existing mailbox to an Active Directory account. Instead, a new mailbox will be generated and the previous mailbox will remain in a disconnected state. For more information about this behavior, see Understanding Mailbox GUIDs.

The Mailbox Recovery Center was added to Exchange System Manager in Exchange Server 2003. The Mailbox Recovery Center replaces functionality that was previously available only in the MBConn tool for Exchange 2000 Server. For more information about the MBConn tool, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 301585, "XADM: Workarounds for Problems with Mbconn.exe".

For More Information

For more information about other methods you can use to enable, disable, and re-home mailboxes, see Using Active Directory Attributes to Enable, Disable, and Re-Home Mailboxes.

For more information about moving Exchange mailbox databases, see Moving an Exchange Mailbox Database to Another Server or Storage Group.