Off Boarding an exchange online account to on premise

LouD 6 Reputation points
2022-08-08T17:59:29.557+00:00

Hello. We have migrated most of our users from exchange 2016 to exchange online using the online migration tool and will be running as a hybrid.

We have a handful of users where their online mailbox has provisioned but the account has errored and so we now have two mailboxes. One on premise (received external emails and cloud receives all internal emails). We know the error was created as added the exchange license in the wrong order.

I now wish to delete the online account to start the migration again and sync the emails, users know they will lose all exchange online emails and have exported their online calendar.

I am off-boarding the users to return to MailUser status which will then allow me to remove the exchange license and start the migration again.

I've run into an issue with my first attempted user and wonder if anyone can offer some assistance?

Error: RecipientNotFoundPermanentException: Cannot find a recipient that has mailbox GUID ‎'XXXXX‎'

When I check powershell I get the online GUID results fine.

When I run on DC exchange man shell:
Get-remotemailbox useremail | format-list ExchangeGUID
It returns:
The operation couldn't be performed because object 'user' couldn't be found on 'DOMAIN'.

I then look up msExchGUID in AD - its not the same. So try and set it but as the user can't be found its impossible.

I then read I needed to enable remote mailbox - Enable-RemoteMailbox USERNAME -RemoteRoutingAddress USER@snhgov.mail.onmicrosoft.com - I tried this with the result:
This task does not support recipients of this type

  • which makes sense as the system believes its been migrated.

I'm now stuck on what to do, is anyone able to offer some assistance. I hope I don't run into new issues on each user I try to regress back to Mailuser.

Thanks for reading.

Exchange Server Management
Exchange Server Management
Exchange Server: A family of Microsoft client/server messaging and collaboration software.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Management
Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Management
Microsoft Exchange: Microsoft messaging and collaboration software.Hybrid Management: Organizing, handling, directing or controlling hybrid deployments.
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  1. Andy David - MVP 151.3K Reputation points MVP
    2022-08-08T18:03:40.193+00:00

    You have to disable the on-prem mailbox first using on-prem Powershell
    disable-mailbox <user>

    Then enable the remote mailbox

    https://blog.expta.com/2016/05/creating-remote-mailbox-in-exchange.html

    No need to offboard the ExO mailbox, just disable the duplicate on-prem mailbox, then enable as a remote mailbox and let it sync to Azure.


  2. Andy David - MVP 151.3K Reputation points MVP
    2022-08-08T18:21:51.513+00:00

    Ok, if you want to completely trash the ExO mailbox and keep the on-prem one to be moved later, follow this:

    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/permanently-clear-previous-mailbox-info/ba-p/607619

    Keep in mind, this will perm del their ExO mailbox and its not recoverable so export out to a pst anything in Exo you want to keep

    Set-User Jon@contoso.com -PermanentlyClearPreviousMailboxInfo
    

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