Mailbox moved from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 may be shown as Linked Mailbox

Every time i do another SBS 2003 to 2011 migration, i say to myself that there possibly can’t be anything that can surprise me.

Boy i was wrong!!!

Just recently a fairly standard migration, smooth sailing up to the point where i started migrating mailboxes. Most of them appeared to be normal, but i noticed some of the moved  mailboxes in Exchange 2010 management console had a strange icon i have never seen before.

As usual, internet to the rescue, i discovered 2 solutions. First i came across a suggestion to remove the mailbox and than link it back to the account:

  1. Open Exchange 2010 Management Console and navigate to Recipient Configuration -> Mailbox
  2. Right-click the Linked Mailbox in question and select Disable. Click Yes to confirm removal.
  3. Navigate to Recipient Configuration -> Disconnected Mailbox, right-click the disconnected mailbox in question and select Connect. You will be presented with a Connect Mailbox wizard.
  4. Select the User Mailbox option and click Next.
  5. Click Browse next to Matching user and locate the user account to be linked to. Also type in an Alias for the mailbox. Click Next and Connect to finish the process.

At this point the mailbox should be listed correctly as User Mailbox.

 

After some further research i discovered a second solution as well in this Microsoft Technet article. Here’s a guide to achieve the same result using this MS article.

  1. Launch ADSI Edit. Click Start, click Run, type adsiedit.msc in the text box, and then click OK.
  2. Navigate to the user account that is showing the Linked Mailbox type.
  3. Right click the user account and select Properties.
  4. Locate and select the msExchRecipientTypeDetails attribute, click Edit and change the value from 2 to 1. Click OK to save and close the Properties window.
  5. Open Exchange Management Console and check the type of user mailbox is correct.

Just a side note on this, i have a suspicion the reason this happened with some mailboxes was that this domain was migrated in some way from an older server. I base this claim on 2 facts – there was some AD migration tool installed on the server and some user accounts had older (read other) domain information in them.