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HealthMailbox user accounts

Anonymous
2021-10-26T07:05:04.687+00:00

Hello..

We are running Exchange 2013 and we have 30 HealthMailbox accounts showing in ADUC\Microsoft Exchange System Objects\Monitoring mailboxes

Some of these accounts have never had a password change and some show that a password is not required

What are these accounts used for and can they be deleted?

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Exchange | Exchange Server | Management
Exchange | Exchange Server | Management

The administration and maintenance of Microsoft Exchange Server to ensure secure, reliable, and efficient email and collaboration services across an organization.

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  1. Andy David - MVP 160.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-10-26T11:48:35.887+00:00

    You can delete them, yes.
    You can delete all of them and recreate:

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/60635/healthmailbox-cleanup.html

    You can delete them all with powershell:
    Get-Mailbox -Monitoring | Remove-Mailbox

    Make sure you also read this and give the necessary permissions so the AD objects are removed:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/administration/remove-mailboxdatabase-cannot-remove-health-mailboxes

    Otherwise, remove the AD objects manually

    Then restart the Microsoft Exchange Health Manager, MSExchangeHM service on each 2013 server to recreate them.

    1 person found this answer helpful.

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  1. Gary D. Hart 6 Reputation points
    2022-05-06T22:54:50.337+00:00

    Which particular filter query string setting for MSGraph API can be used in order to ask MSGraph to handle server-side not including these HealthMailbox'es?

    I'd initially tried doing this with a startswith for email address of "HealthMailbox"... but.. you apparently they don't have support to be able to say "NOT StartsWith" in a filter of Users objects, and answer given was that StartsWith is something you'd have to implement client-side.

    Which I was able to do. But it not the right way to do it, as other future system derived names could spring up later on. So I ws looking for another property I could perhaps based the filtering of the Query upon that could detect the difference between regular users accounts... and these special accounts the system itselfs creates.

    I see this "creationType" property which says it has "Member" or "Guest". But I'm kind of thinking that want work because if you're the system and you made an account, you certainly wouldn't consider it "Guest", right? So that would seem to take this away as a means of separating out these "HealthMailbox" accounts with some kind of filter query that can handle the task all on the server-side of weeding out these "HealthMailbox" accounts.

    So any help in that regard would be appreciated, Thank you.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2021-10-27T02:23:40.88+00:00

    Hi @Anonymous ,

    These health mailboxes are used for the Managed Availability feature, here is the introduction:

    Managed Availability performs continuous tests (probes) that simulate end-user actions, to detect possible problems with Exchange components or their dependencies. If probes are failing, it performs gradual simple recovery actions to bring the affected component in healthy state. It uses special type of mailboxes, called Monitoring Mailboxes or health mailboxes, to simulate end-user kinds of tests. The life cycle of monitoring mailboxes is taken care entirely by Managed Availability components.

    For more details, you could read this topic:
    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/exchange-2013-2016-monitoring-mailboxes/ba-p/611004

    And as Andy said, you could delete them but they'll be recreated if the MS Exchange Health Manager service is restarted.

    Best regards,
    Lou

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    1 person found this answer helpful.
  3. Marco Schiavon 711 Reputation points
    2021-10-26T09:39:45.317+00:00

    Basically, starting from Exchange 2013, are functional mailboxes to auto monitoring of the health of Exchange itself.

    this is a good article: 611004

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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