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bbiit

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Re-routing e-mail.

Hello. We have an employee we are letting go. In order to protect network resources, I will be deleting his/her account from our network. We are running SBS2003 and Exchange. Is there a way for me to delete the account, but keep the e-mail address up and running? We would like to re-direct business e-mails to another user so they will be able to pick up where the terminated employee left off concerning all jobs/tasks that are still ongoing, but we want to essentially lock them out of the network. Any suggestions? Thank you.
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poweruser32

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WindowsServerGuy

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I wouldn't suggest deleting either the user account or the mailbox.
Simply drop the email address from the user account, create another dummy address as a place holder and put the address you want to retain on to another account.

The original mailbox can then be stored for someone to look at.

Simon.
Retention policy on Exchange will hold it after being deleted long enough to reattach it should it be necessary. After that I'd just exmerge it to a PST (assuming it falls within the 2GB limit) or archive using a 3rd party product. A lot depends on the requirements of you organization regarding message retention and archive policies (if any).
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Sembee: Could you elaborate please? Do you mean I can have two adddresses associated with the same account? If so, why would I need a placeholder. I'm sorry, I'm pretty new at all this.
If the address you want to move is the primary address, you cannot remove it.
Therefore you would need to have two email addresses on the account, the primary address that you want to move and the dummy address.
After creating the dummy address (temp001@domian.com for example) you would set that as the default. That will allow you to remove the the previous primary address so that you can apply it to the another account.

As for the reasons given above for deleting mailbox/account, I don't delete accounts until at least six months has passed and I don't disconnect the mailbox. It is much easier to give someone access to a mailbox on the Exchange server than a PST file. Plus it allows multiple people to have access to the mailbox and it is still within the backup cycle.

Simon.