Best practices for disabling an employees account, but leaving mailbox available for others while not accepting messages

Question

I'm sure that other organizations have some policy for this. In our case, we want to keep the mailbox available for others to still access, but disable the user account and remove it from OWA.
In this case, I've disabled the AD object, disabled OWA from the features, and set the mailbox to only receive emails from a dummy mailbox (so that no new emails are accepted).
This all works fine and senders receive a NDR that their mail was rejected, however I'd also like to set a friendlier custom NDR to call the office instead when any sender attempts to send email to that recipient.
What would best practices, suggestions be for this behavior?

Answer 1

Hi,
According to your description, the user object in AD has been disabled.
In this case, the mailbox cannot mostly likely be accessed. Thus, maybe OOF couldn’t help you.
If I misunderstand your meaning, please feel free to let me know.
And we can depend on transport rule:
The recipient is
send rejection message to sender with enhanced status code:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123506(v=exchg.141).aspx
Thanks,
Angela Shi
TechNet Community Support