Mailboxes are quarantined and not allowed to access in Exchange Server 2010
Original KB number: 2603736
Symptoms
A user can't access a mailbox that resides on a Microsoft Exchange 2010 server.
Cause
The mailbox is a potential threat to the health of the Information store and has been quarantined.
There are several types of events for which the Exchange store tags a mailbox as a potential threat:
- If a thread doing work for that mailbox fails
- If there are more than five threads in that mailbox that haven't made progress for a long time
Resolution
The cause of the poison mailbox must be identified and corrected. Once this is accomplished, to gain access to the mailbox immediately, the registry key for the quarantined mailbox should be reset manually by deleting it.
Note
If this manual step is forgotten, the Exchange store automatically resets quarantined mailboxes six hours after the quarantined flag was set.
More information
For more information, see Poison Mailbox Detection and Correction.