Reconnecting a deleted mailbox in Exchange 2010

I’ve noticed that I keep coming across situations where I’ve been told to recover a deleted mailbox and I’ve repeatedly had to check my old notes to figure out how to do it because I don’t work with Exchange 2010 every day so this post serves to be a reference for myself a few months down the road when I don’t remember the PowerShell cmdlets.

Problem

You’ve accidentally disabled a user from within the Exchange Management Console as such:

Solution

If the mailbox was deleted recently, you would need to use the following cmdlet to reveal the mailbox:

Clean-MailboxDatabase <database name>

Once you’ve ran the Clean-MailboxDatabase cmdlet, continue to list the mailboxes that you can reconnect with the following cmdlet:

Get-MailboxDatabase | Get-MailboxStatistics | where {$_.disconnectreason -ne $null} | ft displayname,database,disconnectreason -auto

An output similar to the following will be displayed:

DisplayName     Database DisconnectReason

-----------     -------- ----------------

Alicia Williams MailboxDB             Disabled

Susan Thompson  MailboxDB             Disabled

Proceed by executing the following cmdlet to reconnect the mailbox to the appropriate login:

Connect-Mailbox -Identity "Alicia Williams" -Database BRCL -User aliciaw