Joseph Neubauer
InstantDoc #45074 at WindowsITPro.com
A lot of thought goes into provisioning and maintaining employees' mailboxes, but little thought typically goes into what to do with those mailboxes after their owners leave the company.
Maintaining a former employee's mailbox is a good idea for many reasons. The mailbox might contain important messages and documents, so deleting it could erase quotes or proposals related to active projects or important messages that haven't been opened.
Nine Exchange configurations and options can help you balance functionality, system stability, and resources when you close out mailboxes.
- Disable, don't delete - you need to have some sort of policies in place to decide how long to keep closed-out mailboxes online.
- Hide the mailbox and review access.
- Turn off rules.
- Configure out-of-office notifications.
- Change the SMTP address.
- Disassociate DLs - recommend to remove the account from distribution list (DL) memberships if you're concerned about storage space and don't want the account to receive messages.
- Stop all mail - to prevent the mailbox from accumulating new messages, assign an empty DL as the alternate recipient for the mailbox.
- Save the mailbox contents - export the content of the mailbox to a .pst file, which provides one more level of recoverability if you need to access the mailbox contents later.
- Deal with legacy delivery - configuring recipient filtering is a simple and easy way to block messages sent to legacy addresses over the Internet.
see the full article here