MS Exchange: how to delete the old server and recreate mailboxes on a new one with the same addresses?

Question

Active Directory

Colleagues, such a problem. We had a domain with MS Exchange 2010 as a mailer. One day the mailman died. Everyone was very happy and moved to Postfix (the email addresses are exactly the same as they were on Exchange). Time passed, the management again wanted MS Exchange (2016). Installed Exchange 2016 and found that Servers still has the old server. But the sadness is not in this, but in the fact that the domain remembers that mailboxes belong to a database lying on the old server. And now it is not clear what to do: it is necessary that users have the same emails as before (clients of the office have them, it will be problematic to notify them of changes). But the old emails are linked to a database that once lived on a now non-existent server. The option "delete user accounts and create anew with the correct database" is not good.

Is there any way to recreate mailboxes with "old" addresses without recreating domain users? So far, I tried to clear homeMDB homeMTA msExchHomeServerName EmailAddress

attributes on my domain user - now this user is not in the list of mailboxes. But in "Create user mailbox - Existing user - Browse" my user is missing.

Answer 1

Using ADSIEdit, delete information about the old server of their scheme, and then write a script that, using ADSI, will erase information about mailbox bindings from accounts.

Answer 2

I assume that after the old Exchange died, you didn't decommission. And data about databases, servers are also present in AD. The way out is to make a decommission, see here or here
. And then you make a migration from Postfix to Exchange. Google it, it won't be a difficult process.
And only then there is a fairly high probability that everything will work for you as it should.
Just do not kill Postfix right away, you can roll back if something is not configured on Exchange.