Categories
How-To Technical

Manually Remove Auto-Mapped Exchange Mailboxes

Beginning with Exchange 2010 then on to Exchange  2013. User who used the client Outlook 2007/2010/and 2013  had a new feature called automapping.

Automapping takes advantage of Exchange auto-discovery services to map mailboxes in which a user has “Full Access” permissions granted.

This is very helpful to the end-user as he or she is no longer required to know or learn how to add additional mailboxes to Outlook.

The not so helpful side is when a user’s access is removed and a ghosted mailbox folder exists in Outlook that the user is unable to remove.  Attempts to close the mailbox result in a message that reads:

This group of folders is associated with an e-mail account. To remove the account, click the File Tab, and on the info tab, click Account Settings, Select the e-mail account, and then click Remove.

Thanks’s but this doesn’t work.  In fact, even on a clean install of Outlook the user still has the ghost folders associated with their Outlook Client.

So to tackle this issue, I used ADSIedit.

  1. Open ADSIEdit (WinKey R to open Run and type adsiedit.msc)
  2. Connect to the Default Naming Context. (Click OK)
  3. Locate the mailbox that you once were granted Full Access Permissions and …
  4. Right-click on the object, view properties.
  5. Scroll down to MsExchDelegateListLinked attribute.
  6. Click Edit, select the User Object and click Remove your information.

Now give it a little time for the change to replicate out in our Active Directory, you will later find these folders to be gone.

To prevent this from occurring when adding mailboxes you could always run the following command to disable automapping:

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity user@jermsmit.com
-User admin@jermsmit.com -AccessRights FullAccess
-AutoMapping:$false

Update from the comments 6/5/2017:
To find the mailbox, you actually find the AD user account, under the OU=Domain Name, within ADSIEdit.  – Thanks ‘ splunch ‘ for the info.

27 replies on “Manually Remove Auto-Mapped Exchange Mailboxes”

Thank you for this! I was testing Full Access and automapping for a user, and added myself to the mailbox. I removed my Full Access permission a week ago and the mailbox was still there. Using ADSI to remove myself from the attribute did the trick.

As soon as I saw this I realized I should have looked in the exchange attributes of the mailboxes that were cluttering up my profile (I recently added full access to a list of users whose mailboxes I had accidentally disconnected, so that I could verify they were operational).

I also had luck with the shell command

remove-mailboxpermission -user -inheritancetype all -accessright fullacce
ss.

Just wanted to say thanks again for this info…I have bookmarked your page and have come back to it numerous times over the past few months…excellent!

Thanks for this, it solved my problem. Most of the so called “solutions” to this problem, don’t actually understand what the problem was and direct you to remove the mailbox via the Outlook interface, which doesn’t work.

Jermsmit, in my case the shared mailboxes aren’t syn with AD, only managed by office365 portal. How can i resolve the issue?
Regards,
João Ferreira

What a lifesaver! Thank you for this post. I have been having a hard time removing the shared mailboxes from my profile. (around 30) It was really having an affect on the performance of my client. Kudos!

My sincerest thanks… Its knowing that I am able to help others in this tech community is truly a driving force for me to share my experiences. Well wishes to you friend. Have a good day. – Jermal (#jermsmit)

Sweet. Very nice. Perfect. Thank you. BTW, to find the mailbox, you actually find the AD user account, under the OU=Domain Name, within ADSIEdit, for the next guy.

Awesome work fella. Been searching on and off for the last 4 months to try and find a solution and this one here it is, bang on the money. I should have picked it up myself but sometimes you are too close to the problem to find that solution. Keep up the excellent work. Cheers, Baz (MCSE / Network Engineer)

Yeah I remember when it drove me crazy .. Mostly end users bugging my desktop team. Glad all worked out for ya. Happy New Year

Hi,

I seem to have had my account added at a higher level so is being inherited, I tried to remove the full access from all mailboxes using this command

Get-Mailbox | Remove-MailboxPermission -user MyUserName -AccessRight FullAccess -confirm:$false

But get this error about inheritance:

WARNING: An inherited access control entry has been specified: [Rights: CreateChild, Delete, ReadControl, WriteDacl,
WriteOwner, ControlType: Allow] and was ignored on object “CN=userPearce,OU=Building Surveying,OU=London,OU=domain1
Users,DC=McDomain,DC=local”.

Would you be able to help me with the automapping command you say about? I’m not too sure what I user in the identity and user switches?

A tip, you don’t need to dig through ADSI Edit… if you enable Advanced Features in AD Users and Computers you can change MsExchDelegateListLinked from the Attribute Editor tab of the user properties.

Just want to add my name to the long list of grateful users. There’s a lot of good intentioned but fruitless advice on the web regarding this issue, but yours actually did the trick. I bookmarked your page and documented your instructions. Thanks again!

Is there anyway to remove it in outlook? I don’t have access to any servers or AD. I’m simply a user with not technological background. I don’t know how to enter it into the command prompt even. Can someone give me very simple step by step instructions for cmd please?

I’m trying to do this for an employee that has been fully removed from our system. obviously, nothing shows up in AD or Exchange. when I go to adsi edit for my user, the MsExchDelegateListLinked attribute is “not set” even though I have full access on other people’s current mailboxes. am i missing something dumb?

Hi guys.

Same as Lance.
I have a user that got removed completely from AD but the other user keeps getting the prompt to connect to that ghost mailbox. Any chance to get rid of it?

Anyone else solve this issue when the Ghost Mailbox owner has already been deleted in AD? I have one Team Manager that has half a dozen old Team Members mailboxes in her Outlook that left years ago still in there. Profile re-builds, new pc’s, digging through ADSIEdit don’t seem to help either.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.