Working with disconnected mailboxes

Question

Am working with a nice automated system to create AD a/c's, if a user leaves we disable, if they come back much later we re-enable with a new mailbox empty rather than re-attach the old. Where this has been hastily,and the old mailbox is disconnected can
we merge the two, or disconnect the new mailbox and reconnect the old without overwriting? Any ideas? odd one.

Answer 1

Yes, you need to do the work quickly - that's why I've written a script to handle the steps, and I point to a single domain controller for my commands so that the work is done quickly.  For instance, in the work above, I'd do the following for a script
of the above steps.  You'd need to supply the information for the two mailboxes you wish to use (the new and the old).
#Get Target Domain Controller
    $DomCtrlr = $env:LogonServer.Substring(2)
#Pull GUIDs for mailboxes to be used
    $NewMailboxGuid = (Get-Mailbox $OldMailboxAlias -DomainController $DomCtrlr).Guid
    $OldMailboxGuid = (Get-MailboxStatistics -Database $OldMailboxDatabase | ? { $_.DisplayName -eq $OldDisplayName -and $_.DisconnectReason -eq 'Disabled' }).MailboxGuid
#Disable old account to remove new mailbox
    Disable-Mailbox $OldMailboxAlias -DomainController $DomCtrlr
    Clean-MailboxDatabase $NewMailboxDatabase
#Connect old mailbox to old account
    Connect-Mailbox -Identity $OldMailboxGuid -Database $OldMailboxDatabase -User $OldMailboxAlias -Alias $OldMailboxAlias -DomainController $DomCtrlr
#Create new account for new mailbox as a shared mailbox and remove mailbox from it
    New-Mailbox -Alias $NewMailboxAlias -Name $NewMailboxName -PrimarySmtpAddress $NewMailboxUndeliverableAddress -Shared -OrganizationalUnit $NewMailboxOU -DomainController $DomCtrlr
    Disable-Mailbox $NewMailboxAlias -DomainController $DomCtrlr
#Connect new mailbox to new account
    Connect-Mailbox -Identity $NewMbxGuid -Database $Database -User $NewMailboxAlias -Alias $NewMailboxAlias -Shared -DomainController $DomCtrlr
#Grant full control rights on new mailbox to old account
    Add-MailboxPermission $NewMailboxAlias -User $OldMailboxAlias -AccessRights FullAccess -DomainController $DomCtrlr
If you copy this out as a PS1, you can give it the names, aliases, and databases of your two mailboxes, and the OU you want the new mailbox account created in, and it will quickly handle the process outlined in the steps above.  Keep in mind that
the lines above are wrapped - the actual start of the lines of code are indented, so if you see one that is not indented, it is part of the previous command.  Note the Clean-MailboxDatabase command (right after the new mailbox is removed from the old
account).  This is required so that your new mailbox can be recovered without waiting for the normal database cleanup process to complete.
Also, I haven't tested this code against a live system.  You'll want to test with your test accounts before actually using on an actual recovery.  HTH ...