My company is currently adding Exchange to our network (migrating from unix email) and our exchange guru wants us to no longer delete AD accounts when an employee is terminated, but to instead rename the account and set the logon hours to deny always. I'm trying to establish for my boss if this is a good idea or a bad idea. CAn anyone point me in the write direction for this. To me it sounds plausable, but it seems wrong to leave accounts active just to keep exchange mailboxes accessable. Any thoughts? ideas? docs? thanks much.

First off, if you were going to do that, instead of disallowing log on for all times of the day, just disable the account. Secondly, that's not a good idea. If you regularly backup the mail store, you can recover the mailbox store in a recovery storage group, and connect it to a new account. Or if you prefer, export the mailbox to pst before deleting the account. Doing it his way clutters the Exchange database as well as Active Directory over time. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. www.redcross.org

I agree completely. at this stage I'm trying to convince managers who are not techs and who play favorites of the wisdom of reason. And our exchange admin is so unapproachable (and the only one we ahve for 6000 users) it's impossible to reason with him without a manager. Let me ask this. Can you have an AD account disabled, but still forwarding email from teh exchange mailbox to another exchange mailbox? our admin says the account has to be enabled for it to work...

"Can you have an AD account disabled, but still forwarding email from teh exchange mailbox to another exchange mailbox? our admin says the account has to be enabled for it to work..." To tell you the truth, I'm not sure. But I have a solution for that, too. Simply remove the smtp address of the disabled account, and add the smtp address to the account you want the mail to go to. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. www.redcross.org

Hey i'm using Exchange 2003 and can tell you that if you do disable an account in the AD Exchange will then reject mail for the assoicated mailbox. heropsycho2177's soln is a good one, but you will need to delete the existing mailbox first as you can't remove a users primary account! So if you need any info stored there make sure it's backed up first. The biggest problem you'll face is that over time it's possible that your 6000 users could have tens of thousands of email addresses. If the addresses are generic eg sales@domain.com then an account called sales should be set up and it's mail forwarded to the correct person. Then when they leave you only need to change who the mail is passed to. Keeping personal addresses alive long after they have left seems odd to me?

"Simply remove the smtp address of the disabled account, and add the smtp address to the account you want the mail to go to." that is the way I want to go. The remaining issue is, what is the best way to have still existing users to have access to the email? can I export the email out of the mailbox to a pst (without going to the users desk)?

Meet your new best friend ExMerge... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=429163EC-DCDF-47DC-96DA-1C12D67327D5&displaylang=en Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. www.redcross.org