Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Exchange 2010 SP1 Removing Automatically Discovered Mailbox

Not too long ago we upgraded our Microsoft Exchange 2010 server to Service Pack 1. A few days later I noticed a mailbox I had granted myself full access permission to automatically appeared in Outlook on all of my computers, without my doing anything.  A quick search and I found this article saying it's a new feature which is pretty awesome as far as I'm concerned. I then noticed it was impossible to remove this from Outlook.  Even after removing myself from the permissions list in the Exchange Management console the mailbox continued to show up. The article shows where it adds the delegate, so I went to the record and lo and behold the link to myself is still there. I had to manually delete the delegate in ADSI Edit, close and re-open Outlook and then the mailbox disappeared. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this bug in the near future.

How to remove the link:

  1. Open ADSI Edit.
  2. Navigate to the user object under Default Naming Context.
  3. Open the properties of the user and scroll down to MsExchDelegateListLink.
  4. Remove the value for yourself.  In this case I removed Andrew.
  5. Wait for any replication to happen in your AD infrastructure.
  6. Close & re open Outlook.  Within a few seconds the mailbox should disappear.


Notes:
* Mailboxes you had granted yourself access too before you installed SP1 will not auto discover
* You will have to manually remove this entry for each mailbox you want to remove from Outlook.  Annoying.