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So I've got a client that has an ancient Exchange 2003 server that I've taken out of commission and replaced with a *nix solution. Dovecot/Postfix both query the email attribute in AD to verify whether or not a user has the ability to read a mailbox (their own) and do some other stuff. Of course, I want to properly remove Exchange 2003 from the schema, but in order to do that I have to delete the Exchange mailboxes in order to uninstall Exchange cleanly. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but by deleting the Exchange mailbox you delete the email attribute in AD, which means I have to go back and manually re-add it for each user. I'd rather not do that, so I was wondering if anyone was aware of a way of killing the Exchange AD integration without deleting the e-mail attribute. I'm all for trashing Exchange via ADSI edit, but I believe that still leaves the individual Exchange attribute tabs visible for each user (Ex. General, Ex. Advanced, etc.).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Why not query for the samaccoutname attribute or the userprincipalname attribute?
    – joeqwerty
    Nov 18, 2013 at 6:37
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    I would still suggest going through the proper route and uninstall Exchange. If you don't want to query the SAMAccount or the UPN, you can also do an export of email address attribute, uninstall Exchange, and then just reimport the attribute back in.
    – Rex
    Dec 18, 2013 at 15:49

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The mail attribute (which contains the user's "primary" email address) will still be available to you after you uninstall Exchange. I'd just export all the mail attributes using the ldifde.exe tool, delete all the mailboxes and immediately re-import all the exported mail attributes. Then you can clean up Exchange properly.

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