Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of techleet
techleet

asked on

Exchange 2003 - Disable exiting user's User Account; what happens to Mailbox?

Hi Guys,

I'm not exactly an Exchange newbie -- i've been administering servers on and off for about 6 years -- but I have no formal training and I'm clueless as to how little or how much I actually *know* about Exchange in general.  I'm missing things here!

Here's my problem.  I have a user who just left the company.  I disabled his Domain Account (Win2k3 domain), but I want to keep his mailbox around for a couple months, just in case the Manager wants to grab some info.  Now Veritas Backup Exec is whining "Directory not found. Cannot backup directory" on that mailbox.  I assume this means there has to be a user account assigned to that particular mailbox.

How do I resolve this, and what are your own personal protocols for dealing with exiting employees and their mailboxes?  Best Practices?  Etc?

Again, please forgive my ignorance.

Thanks! :)
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of mikeleebrla
mikeleebrla
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of techleet
techleet

ASKER

Thanks, I think i'll go the PST route.

Is there a way to pump out a pst directly from the server, or do I have to setup Outlook client and then use the import/export wizard?
the only way i know how is thru the outlook client.
It looks like you can export PSTs from the server using EXMERGE.EXE (http://www.petri.co.il/download_exmerge.htm)

So would you say that exporting the mailbox to a PST and then deleting the mailbox is the industry-standard way of dealing with exiting employees?  I'm trying to get a feel of the Best Way to handle this.

Thanks!

What you can do is change the password and give another user/manager FULL MAILBOX ACCESS to this user's mailbox. THen you don't have to use any sketchy tool like exmerge. All you do is go to another users' outlook that you gave permission to and click and open the mailbox directly from their outlook and since you changed the password the employee who is no longer with the company can't access the mailbox from OWA.


My one gripe with this is, MS says is good practice (well it was years ago) to disable and not delete users when they leave the company. So you disable a user when he leaves and hide their name from the address book from exchange but this seems to cause additional work. I mean they should have made it a little easier IMO escpecially in ex2007 to handle users leaving the company but allowing managers access to their mailbox and avoid NDR's.
You can user EXMERGE to extract emailsfrom Exchange  to PST file directly