Reinstituting Users With a New Mailbox

Question

Every once in a while we have a user who leaves our organization and after some time returns home.
When the user leaves, we sometimes temporarily keep his mailbox for monitoring and archiving, but when the user returns as an active employee (many times under a different job role) we are required to assign him a new mailbox.

Question 1: What is customary in your organization? Do you assign the same username as before and just create/empty the old mailbox? Do you disconnect the mailbox and create a new one? Do you require the creation of a new user?

Question 2: We found that once the mailbox was disconnected, and the user received a new mailbox, we could not connect to the old mailbox via OWA and should someone request to view the content of the old mailbox we needed to create a new test user to which we could connect the old mailbox. Do you know of any other methods by which we could access the disconnected mailbox?

Question 3: If the mailbox is disconnected, according to this document it will be deleted within 30 days unless we change the retention periods, right?

Answer 1

Hi,
Q1: Actually it's my first time to see a user returned as a different job role, it depends on you that whether to empty his old mailbox, does the data in old mailbox need to be kept for some time? If not, delete the old mailbox in AD and he can use the same name.
Q2: That's the expected behaviour, some third-party tools could export mailbox with .pst file by accessing the database file but we don't recommend.
Q3: Yes, you can check it in Eac-server-database:

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