So after creating an Exchange server, setting up receive connectors and send connectors and e-mail address policies, you feel like something is still missing. Something just doesn’t feel right, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You start spot-checking your mailboxes, your user accounts in AD, and then it hits you like a foam brick thrown from a great distance by a kindergartner…you have no mailbox. It’s almost inconceivable, but there it is. All of your users’ were updated with their new email address; they have mailboxes, but you are out of luck. No errors, nothing in the logs…just no mailbox. You try to rerun the e-mail address policy wizard to no avail. You try to manually create a mailbox for an existing user in EMC, and your account doesn’t even show up in the list of users! WTH?
I don’t have any answers for you. I can’t tell you why this happened. If it’s any consolation to you…it’s not personal. It happened to me, too (probably explains why I’m blogging about it.) What I can do is this…I can tell you how to ‘fix’ it so you can move on with configuring your server.
Not knowing the why behind this issue is going to bug me until I can figure it out…but there is so much to do and so little time in which to do it. If you are in a similar predicament, and just need your own mailbox so you can move on, do this.
- Open ADUC, and fill in the email address attribute for your user account.
- Open Exchange Management Console.
- Browse down to Organization Configuration, Mailbox.
- On the Database Management tab, right-click on your mailbox database and choose properties.
- Copy the name of your database. Mine is called "Mailbox Database 0873947958."
- Open an Exchange Management Shell, and enter this command, where domain\username is the name of your user in NetBIOSdomainName\sAMAccountName format and databasename is the name of your database from step X above, quote enclosed if there are spaces in the name.
enable-mailbox –identity domain\username –database databasename- Go back to your EMC, browse down to Recipient Configuration, and viola!
There’s tons more you can do at the EMS prompt. Details can be found on TechNet here. I’ve done a lot with my Exchange org since having to do this, and everything about the mailbox created this way seems to be in line with the ones that were created automagickally, so I am pretty sure we’re good to go with this.
I will go back and figure out why this borked on me someday, but that will be a post for another day. While you’re waiting for answers, check out this clip. It seems appropriate </wink.>
direct link for RSS and email subscribers…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBIxScJ5rlY
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