Tips for Exchange account disablement and deletion

Question

I'm in an organization where I have nearly 30 smaller groups working under the parent domain. Each organization has different ideas on how to deal with user account deletion in AD and Exchange. I'm the sole admin managing this setup and have the following two cases and the environment is Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2010.

1). I have a group of seven users who've left the organization. There's no need to maintain their account data or email, however, I've been asked to set an automatic reply for mail destined for those seven accounts along the lines of :

Username is no longer at this organization. Please contact steve@xxxxx.co.uk for additional information.

The actual messages do not need to be forwarded to anyone. Just discarded or dropped. Is there a nice way to do this?

2). Another user was laid-off. The AD account was disabled. It makes sense to forward mail for this user to his manager. However, what is the cleanest way to keep his old account intact for compliancy purposes (we also have email journaling via MailArchiva)? Would it be just delegation or mailbox rights? Do you just export the entire account to .PST? Is there a preferred way to do this, as it seems inline with what most people would have to do when people leave an organization.

Edit: I do also have a Barracuda Spam firewall as the mail gateway.

Answer 1

1) We do this outside of the exchange level at the mail gateway. We put an autoreply on and drop the messages. It doesn't sound like you have a mail gateway in your situation the easiest might be to drop all the ex employees emails on to a dummy account and put mailbox limits in place, or just let the mailbox grow and periodically clear it out. The mailbox limit may generate a "Recipients mailbox full message" which you may not want, but it will save on the cost of the mails actually hitting exchange.

2) This depends on what you need to be compliant with. I would recommend leaving the account active for a few weeks and checking back with the manager then to see if it was still needed. If it was no longer needed I would exmerge the account, run an ldifde or csvde account information export and then delete the account. If the manager needs the email to be forwarded you can set this up in exchange and provide a PST to him.

When dealing with email be sure to have a documented process and check with HR as well. In a lot of instances you are dealing with privacy and under compliance you want to be clear on what it is you are changing and providing people access to and ensure nothing is wrong or "illegal".

Actually it looks like with 2010 you want export-mailbox rather than exmerge http://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/exchange/goodbye-exchange-exmerge,-hello-export-mailbox/

CSVDE: http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/Logon/Logon_CSVDE_Export.htm