Exchange 2000 - How to recover mail when user account is deleted

[Mike Hendrickson]

Does the mailbox still exist, or was that deleted months
ago as well? If the mailbox still exists, you can go in
the Exchange System Manager, expand your Mailbox Store,
go to Mailboxes, right click on the mailbox you want, and
reconnect it to a different user account.

If the mailbox itself has been deleted, and you don't
have an Exchange backup from when it existed, then there
is nothing you can do. If you do have an Exchange backup
from that time, you can setup an Offline Recovery Server,
and restore the backup to that, then Exmerge the contents
of the mailbox back to your production server.

The below article explains how to setup an Offline
Recovery Server:

813337 HOW TO: Recover or Restore a Single Mailbox in
Exchange 2000 Server
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=813337

>-----Original Message-----
>The subject says it all... How can I recover the
contents of an Exchange 2000 mailbox when the user
account has already been deleted. Not only that, but the
account was deleted months ago, so I can't do an Active
Directory Restore to recover it.
>
>Regards,
>
>Larry
>.
>

[Mike Hendrickson]

You will only have the Reconnect or Purge options if the
mailbox is disconnected (it will have a Red X next to
it). If it is not disconnected, right click on Mailboxes
and choose Run Cleanup Agent. If it still doesn't
disconnect, then the mailbox is still attached to some
user somewhere.

>-----Original Message-----
>Mike,
>
>That's what I thought, but both options (Reconnect and
Purge) are greyed out for ALL mailboxes.
>
>Larry
>.
>