There are some situations where all your Exchange Server mailboxes may become inaccessible. It is very catastrophic situations which could possibly lead to business destruction. The inaccessible mailboxes needs to be recovered for proper use.
In earlier versions of Exchange Server, it was somewhat complicated to recover your inaccessible mailboxes, but in Exchange 2003, it is very easy to do this task. The recovery is feasible with the help of Mailbox Recovery Center mechanism, without having a separate Exchange Server.
The Mailbox Recovery Center
It is useful to get access to all mailboxes of Exchange 2003 server when they become inaccessible due to corruption in database or internal application errors. This option is also applicable to recover the accidentally deleted Exchange Server mailboxes.
When mailboxes get corrupted or deleted, they are not actually removed from the server. Instead, the mailboxes are retained in a special location. When you attempt to access such mailboxes, the Exchange Server can not find them and shows you some sort of error messages.
The Mailbox Recovery Center exists in Active Directory. To perform EDB repair, you need to create a new Exchange Server account. Now replicate the new account. As soon as the replication process completes, verify it to all other domain controllers in domain.
When you see the mailbox store, corrupted or deleted mailboxes will be shown with a red X icon. The red X icon indicates that the mailboxes are not actually gone and can be recovered.
To recover these mailboxes, you need to simply reconnect them. To reconnect the inaccessible mailboxes, navigate through System Manager to Tools-> Mailbox Recovery Center. Right click to Mailbox Recovery Center container and choose Add Mailbox Store from resulting shortcut menu.
It will show you the list of mailbox stores in your whole Exchange organization. Select the mailbox store from which you need to access your mailboxes and click Add and then OK. In the right pane, you will see the deleted mailboxes. Select all mailboxes and right click and select Find Match command from resulting shortcut menu.
After completing the matching process successfully, you would be able to see all your mailboxes in mailbox store and would be able to access them. In this way you can get access to all mailboxes in Exchange 2003 Server.
