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You should move the on-prem AD account back into an OU that syncs with Azure and let it sync up again.
Unable to recover inactive mailbox
Joe Grover
566
Reputation points
We have a 365 hybrid environment. Today I placed a mailbox on litigation hold, moved the local AD account for that user to an OU that does not sync to 365, and the mailbox went inactive. Apparently there was a user who was a delegate of that mailbox that still wanted access for another week or two, so I went into Deleted Users in the admin center and restored the user. This removed the mailbox from being Inactive and it shows as an active User Mailbox in the Exchange Online Admin Center now.
However I'm unable to make any changes to the mailbox. I went in to try to add the user back as a delegate on the mailbox and when I try to save the settings I get an error that I don't have permissions to perform that action. I went back to the general Admin Center and on the Mail tab went to manage the ligitation hold. I saw it was still enabled, so I unchecked the box and clicked Save, only to get an error saying "Couldn't update mailbox litigation hold info."
Any ideas how to reactivate this mailbox? It was only inactive for a couple of hours.
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Joyce Shen - MSFT 16,701 Reputation points2021-12-01T02:53:42.677+00:00 Hi @Joe Grover
Have you tried moving back the user to the synced OU then verify the result again?
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Joe Grover 566 Reputation points
2021-12-01T12:09:25.383+00:00 I did do that, yes. The user shows up in the admin center as a synced user, but I still get the errors.
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Andy David - MVP 157.8K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator2021-11-30T22:04:30.207+00:00 -
Joe Grover 566 Reputation points
2021-12-01T12:10:08.133+00:00 I did do this, I apologize for not mentioning it. The user shows as being a synced user in the admin center, not a cloud user.
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Amit Singh 5,306 Reputation points2021-12-01T12:07:12.863+00:00 These old emails may be in archived mailboxes that were not saved when converted to a Shared Mailbox.
You may find their PST on their old workstation.
The default location for the PST is
C:\users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook and post 2013 C:\users\username\Documents\Outlook Files
Please mark as "Accept the answer" if the above steps helps you. Your suggestion will help others also !
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Joe Grover 566 Reputation points
2021-12-01T12:11:24.773+00:00 This isn't an option unfortunately. This is a mailbox for a user that has been gone for some time. Another user was granted access to the mailbox and is not syncing shared mailboxes to his local machine.
The mailbox was only made inactive for about 1-2 hours before I tried to undo it. The mailbox shows up in Exchange Admin Center and shows the proper size (4.5GB used) but I have no way of accessing it.
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Andy David - MVP 157.8K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2021-12-01T12:25:35.673+00:00 A couple of things to try:
Apply an ExO license to the mailbox.
Verify the remote mailbox is still there on-prem. If not, re-enable itEnable-RemoteMailbox "Kim Akers" -RemoteRoutingAddress "kima@Company portal .mail.onmicrosoft.com"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/enable-remotemailbox?view=exchange-ps
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Joe Grover 566 Reputation points
2021-12-03T15:27:18.467+00:00 Remote mailbox is still on-prem, and the license does have a 365 E3 license assigned to it (it auto-assigned when I restored the account from soft-delete).
I'm going to re-delete it, and this time just move the AD object back in to sync back. Before I restored it from the admin center, and when I believe it showed as being a cloud account. I moved the account locally back into the sync OU and then it showed in the admin center as being a synced account.
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Andy David - MVP 157.8K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2021-12-03T15:29:23.257+00:00 Yea, I would start from scratch and do that.
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Joe Grover 566 Reputation points
2021-12-03T20:26:48.88+00:00 That did the trick. Apparently I borked something doing it two different ways. I removed the account from being synced, waited until it disappeared and went inactive again, then just moved it back into a synced OU and it allowed me to remove the hold/add delegates/etc.
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Andy David - MVP 157.8K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2021-12-03T21:27:34.357+00:00 Cool. Please accept an answer so we can close. Thanks!
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