Linked mailboxes may be necessary for organizations that deploy Exchange in a resource forest. The resource forest scenario lets an organization centralize Exchange in a single forest, while allowing access to the Exchange organization with user accounts that are located in one or more trusted forests (called account forests). The user account that accesses the linked mailbox doesn't exist in the forest where Exchange is deployed. Therefore, a disabled user account that exists in the same forest as Exchange is created and associated with the corresponding linked mailbox.
Powershell script to bulk convert linked mailboxes
A trust between the Exchange forest and at least one account forest must be set up before you can create linked mailboxes. At a minimum, you must set up a one-way, outgoing trust so that the Exchange forest trusts the account forest. For more information, see Learn more about setting up a forest trust to support linked mailboxes.
* User logon name: For user mailboxes, this is the name that the user uses to sign in to their mailbox and to log on to the domain. For linked mailboxes, the corresponding user account that is created in the Exchange forest when the linked mailbox was created is disabled. The user uses their credentials from the account forest to sign in to the linked mailbox.
Use the Mailbox Usage section to view or change the mailbox storage quota and deleted item retention settings for the linked mailbox. These settings are configured by default when the linked mailbox is created. They use the values that are configured for the mailbox database and apply to all mailboxes in that database. You can customize these settings for each mailbox instead of using the mailbox database defaults.
Use the Get-Mailbox and Set-Mailbox cmdlets to view and change properties for linked mailboxes. One advantage of using the Exchange Management Shell is the ability to change the properties for multiple linked mailboxes. For information about what parameters correspond to mailbox properties, see the following topics:
This example uses the Set-Mailbox command to limit the number of recipients allowed on the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: lines of an email message to 500. This limit applies to all linked mailboxes in the organization.
In the Exchange Management Shell, use the Get-Mailbox cmdlet to verify the changes. One advantage of using the Exchange Management Shell is that you can view multiple properties for multiple linked mailboxes. In the example above where the recipient limit was changed, running the following command will verify the new value.
There are a couple of ways to bulk convert user mailbox to shared mailbox. One way is with a CSV file, and another way is with a text file. First, you are going to learn how to do it with a CSV file. After that, you will learn how to do it with a text file.
Start Microsoft Excel and write in the left top cell (A1) Email. Write below the cell A1 all the user mailboxes that you like to convert to shared mailbox. Write the display name or the email address of the user mailbox. Both will work when converting the user mailbox. In my example, the display name is written.
Run the cmdlet to bulk convert user mailbox to shared mailbox. After running the cmdlet and all went great, the output will show you nothing. If it does give you an output with errors, investigate it.
Many people ask me what will be the best way to bulk convert exchange mailbox to MailUser on the on-prem exchange after or during their exchange migration to Office 365. I always said there are many people post how to do this online, you can easily find how to do this. However, many of my friends still can not find one which works correctly for them. So I decided to share this so that can benefit more people.
I originally found a Convert mailbox-enabled user into a mail-enabled user PowerShell script from the script is done by Jonathan - jon@elderec.org. However, it only can do this user by user. so I created a batch processing script to make it easy for process large amount of users. the benefit of this script is it not only convert the user to MailUser. It also moves all email alias and x400 and x500 address to the newly created MailUser.
What we need for the conversion script are the user's name and email address. I normally group the user I want to convert into AD groups so I can easily export their name and email address by PowerShell script below.
Now all the script is in place you can start rolling. you do need to run it under the Exchange Management Shell. after you run the bulk process you can see the output as below depending on how many users you are processing.
In an upcoming post, I will share a more detailed automation script for doing this the proper way, in bulk (including mirroring group memberships from a template user & even adding your MSOL licensing). But here is a one-liner to get you started, anyway (equivalent to the above GUI method but allows you to add accounts in bulk):
If you want to get a consolidated report on mailbox permissions, you can download the script to generate a mailbox permission report. This PowerShell script finds Office 365 users who have full access, send-as, and send-on-behalf permission on other mailboxes, and export them to CSV file.
Shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 can be converted (back) to a user mailbox. This can be necessary when you need to access the mailbox directly (from an application or specific device) or accidentally convert the wrong user mailbox to a shared mailbox.
Hello,Is this a supported way of converting a mailbox to a linked mailbox ?Do you know if this command (convert) will be made available/supported in Exchange 2007?Regards,Rikard
Is there a way to do this for multiple mailboxes (i.e. bulk link mailboxes)? We plan on migrating mailboxes first and user accounts later and need to link moved mailboxes in the target forest back to the users accounts in the source forest.
A faster and easier option is to use Netwrix Auditor State-in-Time reports for Exchange Online and Exchange Server. In just a few clicks, you can generate a report on all your shared mailboxes with all the crucial details, such as which users have non-owner rights to which mailboxes and what permission level each user has. In addition, Netwrix Auditor for Exchange provides information about mailbox access events, shared mailbox permissions changes, and much more. You can also easily refine your audit results using the built-in filters and set up report subscription. As a result, you will have far better control over what's happening in your Exchange environment.
HI Paul,a very tricky question you please help me on below requirement.if i run any exchange powershell command the complete output should be captured in transcript, Example If i run start transcript and then new=mailboxexportrequest with mailbox name and path then command will execute and in transcript i could see only output as mailbox is in pending status but i would like to capture all back end process until mailbox exported to the given path. Is there a way to do it. Kindly help me on this.
Hi PaulThis script is exactly what I am looking for but I cant get it to work.I can get the Get-Help up but if i run the command with the -all parameter it does nothing. I just get a new powershell window. A file gets created but with 0bytes.Any ideas. The command I run is: .\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 -All > C:\Temp2\newdata.csvIt just comes to a new PS line (as if waiting for a new command).
Thanks for providing this great tool. I wanted ask if there other parameters that could be used to pull stats for mailboxes within a child domain? We have a root domain that contains several child domains. Is there a way for your script to just search for users of single domain?
Paul ,Great Script, Hats up for you.The script run great with in powershell window with all the parameters defined.Any idea how to execute this script from .Net C# with command line arguments like -all , -server etc. Any Help will greatly be appreciated
I am not the best at powershell and have seen that there are ways to get around this but have not been successful. Is there a chance that you will update this script so that it would work on Exchange 2013?
Thank you for this great script. I am trying to tweak the powershell to get it to show me the StorageLimitStatus but cannot seem to get it to work. I have added Storage LimitStatus to the $stats list (Line 154) and added a new row like the others (Line 179). The heading shows up on my CSV, but I get no data. The two lines as I have them in my code are as follows:
Paul, that was exactly the problem I was having. I was opening the Exchange Management Shell and then typing powershell to bring up the PS> prompt that I was seeing in the video. Running it strictly from the EMS works perfectly.Todd and Paul, thanks again for all your help. Great stuff and great script!
Thanks for the great script. I modified the Total Item Size and Deleted Item Size ToGB() because of the size of the mailboxes I am dealing with. I was wondering how I could format the values to 2 decimal place ex 9.65 right now it is displayed as 9. I tried figuring this out on my own but I am a powershell noob.
FYI I wrote a similar in concept script to generate Exchange 2010 mailbox billing reports in Excel directly. While it is a slightly different focus than what you are doing (in that it grabs all customer mailboxes or specific OUs, not databases or servers), perhaps you could recycle the Execl logic in my script to dump your data directly into Excel spreadsheet where you have already pre-formatted the attributes the way you want (which we also had to do) and save yourself a step or two: -Mailbox-Billing-a33bcbec
Thanks again paul for an amazing time saver(and also teaches me powershell)i only had one issue when i ran it through 2010 ps(dont know if it matters) using -filei got cannot move something about distinguage name cannot be used or must be used:) when using -ignorescopeso i removed the ignorescope for the file part of the script and it ran like a charmer:)Thanks againMuch appreciated 2ff7e9595c
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