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One fine Monday, one of the user walked up to my desk and asked me to take a look at her Outlook. I was so busy that I said I’d visit her desk after lunch. But the user said it is very urgent that I have to take a look at it as she says that her Outlook closes when she opens her e-mails.

As curiosity drove me, I followed her to her desk, and tried switching folders and noticed that her Outlook client crashes, when we try to switch folders. OWA opens up fine without any issues. I’d love to put the Outlook on cached mode, but unfortunately, user is on a citrix and we can’t do that. But my laptop helped me to configure her profile on my Outlook which worked fine in cached mode but crashes in Online mode.

Thinking so seriously about it, I chased my IT dept staffs and found that her 3GB mailbox was moved from one store to another, over the weekend. Movement caused corruption? Argh!! I felt angry on the user for having such a huge mailbox and my IT dept staffs for not testing the big mailboxes after movement. Luckily, among all the mailboxes moved, she was the only one whose mailbox size is more than 500mb.

Thanks to Exmerge, with the help of which, we moved the e-mails to a PST, created a new mailbox for the user, and moved them back with a little different approach to avoid missing any e-mails But my happiness didn’t last longer!

What did I do?

1. I used “Delete mailbox” to disconnect the corrupted mailbox.
2. Created a new mailbox and changed her legacyexchangedn using ADSIEdit(to help the old mailbox to be re-connected to another account), so that her incoming e-mails would still flow in and she can work without pestering me for some time.
3. Connected her old mailbox to a test user with a same display name(Glad that I did it! )
4. Using ExMerge, extracted the e-mails from old mailbox to a PST. While this happened, I re-configured her Outlook and had my lunch!
5. Deleting the test account, I renamed the PST to her Exchange Alias of her existing account and imported it back.
6. After everything was successful, I sent an e-mail to her that her old mailbox is restored. Locking my PC, I went out for a cup of coffee.

On returning, I was surprised to see a NDR for my e-mail, and a e-mail from the user stating that her colleagues’ e-mails to her are bouncing back to them. They should be either replying to the old e-mails sent by her or using the “Auto-complete” option on Outlook(nk2 entry) to find her and e-mail her.

Cursing my idea to change the legacyexchangedn of the user, I could’ve very well modified the  attribute, but later, someone else would come running to me complaining that they are not able to reply to the (new) e-mails from her.

Resolution: X500!!! Yes, I added the old legacyexchangedn value to her new address as a X500, and user never came to my desk after that! What did I do?

1. Went to the properties of the user.
2. Navigated to the e-mail address tab.
3. “Add” a new “Custom Address”
4. Filled in “type” as “X500″ and entered the address as the value, that Outlook displayed as her in her’s old e-mails that she sent(/O=”ORG NAME”/OU=”ORG UNIT”/CN=”RECIPIENTS”/CN=”USER ALIAS”)
5. And I did relax for the rest of my week until the user ran into another problem!

MORAL:

1. To be dead careful when moving large mailboxes(especially of nosy pestering users). Test if they are able to access their e-mails after movement
2. Never create a test account to recover the e-mails of a live account.
3. Never ever change the legacyexchangedn of the user unless or until you want to be disturbed by him/her.
4. Even if you did, put it back to the user as a x500 address if you feel that he/she would not allow you to have a peaceful break following the change.

Anything I missed out, readers, please, in comments!

-Muthu

Posted February 26th, 2010 under ExMerge, Exchange 2003, Recovery. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.