If you’re a seasoned administrator, you have knowledge that in Exchange, the database settings will allow you to set the deleted mailbox retention. The default is 30 days, but sometimes you need to purge all those deleted mailboxes to do some ‘spring cleaning’ as it were. Note that doing these cmdlets does not change the ‘Whitespace’ of the database or the size. In my case, I had to purge everything of a toxic individual that was tainting my network much to my disappointment and did the following to complete that task.
The following cmdlet will seek all Soft Deleted mailboxes within the database you select and manually purge them from Exchange.
1 | Get-MailboxStatistics -Database "DB01" | where {$_.DisconnectReason -eq "SoftDeleted"} | foreach {Remove-StoreMailbox -Database $_.database -Identity $_.mailboxguid -MailboxState SoftDeleted} |
Now, should you only want to remove one mailbox, you will need to get the GUID of that Soft Deleted mailbox first so that you can enter it for the identity parameter.
1 2 3 4 5 6 | Get-MailboxStatistics -Database "DB01" | where {$_.DisconnectReason -eq "SoftDeleted"} | Sort-Object DisconnectDate -descending | ft -a -wr Get the Mailbox GUID in the list for the deleted mailbox. Then Run: Remove-StoreMailbox -Database "DB01" -Identity "mailboxguid" -MailboxState SoftDeleted | ft -a -wr |
You can also preform a similar task for a disabled mailbox:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | Get-MailboxStatistics -Database "DB01" | where {$_.DisconnectReason -eq "Disabled"} | Sort-Object DisconnectDate -descending | ft -a -wr Get the Mailbox GUID in the list for the deleted mailbox. Then Run: Remove-StoreMailbox -Database "DB01" -Identity "mailboxguid" -MailboxState Disabled | ft -a -wr |
You can perform the task on all disabled mailboxes for that database as well:
1 | Get-MailboxStatistics -Database "DB01" | where {$_.DisconnectReason -eq "Disabled"} | foreach {Remove-StoreMailbox -Database $_.database -Identity $_.mailboxguid -MailboxState Disabled} |
NOTE: I would be very careful when performing either of these cmdlets as they will completely purge the mailboxes from the schema. If these cmdlets assist you with your ‘spring cleaning’, I will have been happy to assist.
HAPPY PURGING!
PLEASE COMMENT!
IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS!
References:
Purging Deleted Mailboxes on Exchange 2013
