Track down multiple Mailboxes associated with a single user after a currupted database

Question

Server is Exchange 2013 CU 22 running on Server 2012 R2. Backstory is a drive holding one of the 5 databases ran out of space and corrupted the database. I was able to use exeutil.exe to fix the corruption and online the database and then we went through moving all the mailboxes from that formerly corrupt but no longer reliable database over to the other 4. While doing the moves we had three mailboxes that failed with errors, all others moved successfully. So for those three users we exported out their mail using Outlook (offline cache mode) to a pst, deleted their mailboxes from exchange, then recreated new mailboxes. We reset their Outlook and once connected imported in all their mail. Other then deleting old cached addresses in Outlook everything worked fine.

Today when we were doing some statistics on server usage. We ran the following to get the output of all the user mailboxes:

Get-MailboxStatistics -Server "ServerName" | Select DisplayName, ItemCount, TotalItemSize

The problem was for one of the users there were three entries, for another there were two:

Name        Items   Size
John Doe    29039   8,802,381,864
John Doe    29003   8,790,364,474
John Doe    27900   6,153,185,761
Jane Smith  28826   3,561,619,441
Jane Smith  26957   3,127,686,149

Both those users were affected by the corrupt database. The third user correctly had one record. I then went to check one of them individually using this:

Get-MailboxStatistics -identity JDoe | Select DisplayName, ItemCount, TotalItemSize

But this returned a normal result:

DisplayName ItemCount   TotalItemSize
----------- ---------   -------------
John Doe    27900       5.868 GB (6,153,185,761 bytes)

Looking at that result the item count/size matched identically with one of the three duplicates. So I figured there were two "stuck" mailboxes and one good current one. I then ran this to find them:

Get-MailboxStatistics -Server "ServerName" | Where {$_.Disconnectreason -notlike "$null"}| ft DisplayName,Database,DisconnectDate 

But that returned no results. Whats going on here and how can I find these phantom mailboxes and delete them?

Answer 1

But that returned no results.

Because the two “stuck” mailboxes were not disconnected status, if you run the command, the result will be empty.

If you want to find these phantom mailboxes and delete them, you could perform the follow actions:

1. Run the command to check whether these multiple entries are in the same corrupted database and what the GUIDs of them are: Get-MailboxStatistics -Server "ServerName" | Select DisplayName, ItemCount, TotalItemSize, MailboxGUID, Database

2. According to the result of your last command, these phantom mailboxes weren’t disconnected. So you need to disable them by running the command Disable-Mailbox -Identity first, and then run the Remove-Mailbox -Database “Database Name which the above command returns” -StoreMailboxIdentity "Mailbox GUID" to delete the mailboxes.

Hope everything goes well with you!