Disable Email Accounts in Exchange

Deleting Mailbox in Exchange Admin Console will delete the attached AD objects!

Always great to find out afterwards – thank you Microsoft. :/

So….to just disable an account:

In the Exchange Management Console, right-click and select disable mailbox

or

in the Exchange Management PowerShell, use the Disable-Mailbox cmdlet:

Disable-Mailbox -Identity {mailboxname} -Confirm:$false

Disabling the mailbox will remove the Exchange attributes from the Active Directory object, which disconnects the mailbox and leaves the Active Directory object intact.

The user account will remain in Active Directory and disconnected mailbox will be purged after retention period passes.

You may also need to change a group’s ownership:

Type in the following command and replace “distribution group” with the actual group whose owner is changing.

[PS] >Set-DistributionGroup "distribution group" –ManagedBy "admin.serviceaccount@whomever.com" -BypassSecurityGroupManagerCheck

The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete – Cant add Outlook accounts…

How I recently fixed one hell of an Outlook 2007 to Exchange 2003 connection problem.

This occurred on brand new Windows 7 Enterprise AND brand new Windows XP workstations while trying to configure the Outlook clients to connect to our Exchange 2003 server.

The actual error is:
"The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete – Cant add Outlook accounts.."

Worse still is that this problem did not occur one every new workstation! Windows XP or Windows 7 – only some random ones.

I checked all network/connectivity parameters I could – DNS, LDAP, RPC, TCP/IP etc., and otherwise checked routing and name resolution ad nauseum. And all checked out.
I had this problem a year or so ago but could not find any of my notes! Aggravating to no end. So I swore I would make sure to document my fix when I found one.
So Google here I come….

One of the first things I did then was this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913843/en-us

I checked that the ‘Attendant’ service was running on Exchange; it has been for a few years.

And virtually everything mentioned in every article I could find – 5 days of searching and hundreds of pages!!
Like:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrclients/thread/44a24ec6-33b5-4b66-9fdb-2318b4874fbc

and

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrclients/thread/1227b956-c533-4c08-b56d-150ad8486b4c

I also tried importing the Outlook registry keys from machines (both Windows 7 and Windows XP) that do work – still no joy.

I literally went 11 pages deep on Google http://goo.gl/EddW9 and many, many more deep from each of those, looking for a fix!

I read deep somewhere in one post that someone mentioned running ‘Outlook rpcdiag’ – I don’t remember that switch. I checked RPC on the machine(s) and it showed no errors already right..

But since this was a specific ‘Outlook’ switch I though what the hell.
So…
I ran:
"outlook /rpcdiag" from the command line.

It tried to ‘find connections error’ but did not report anything. Damn..
Then it just closed after it could not really start.

Then I started Outlook in Safemode (I was prompted to upon launching Outlook, but it can be run "outlook /safe").

I was then able to add and configure the Exchange account and get connected!!
I waited until it updated the mailbox completely.
Then I restarted Outlook normally and IT WORKS NOW on all of the affected boxes!

I am not sure if all of these steps need to be taken but I now have a plan to follow.

I hope this may help someone, because from most of the posts I read it is a MAJOR issue and MS is not doing much about it! At least I’ll have my notes.