How to Repair Quarantine Mailbox Exchange using Powershell Cmdlet
Learn How to Repair Quarantine Mailbox Exchange 2013/ 2010/ 2016
Exchange 2013 has an additional feature i.e. Mailbox Quarantine to detect clients that are consuming excessive resources of a mailbox. MAPI clients use multiple threads when connected to a mailbox. However, if one or more threads freeze due to some reason then it utilizes more CPU than it should for servicing the thread. If more than five threads freezes for more than 60 seconds or three threads crashes between 2 hours, then also mailbox is in an abnormal state & you might need to repair Quarantine Mailbox Exchange 2013 with Powershell cmdlet Disable-MailboxQuarantine.
In order to check the number of crashes experienced by the mailbox, quarantining is performed by the background thread in every two hours. If a mailbox exceeds its maximum limit of a crash threshold, then mailbox is put into quarantine by the Exchange Server for overall stability. It is the feature that enabled by default by the Exchange Server at the time of thread crash. Therefore, when a mailbox is in quarantine state, the users lose access to their mailbox. They receive a message like your message wasn’t delivered because the recipient’s mailbox is quarantined. Now, to overcome this quarantine mailbox (or poison mailbox Exchange 2013) issue and to get access back to a mailbox, one must need to repair qualities mailbox Exchange 2013. Hence, in this, we have discussed how to repair quarantine mailbox Exchange 2013.
Suggestion: If you want to repair corrupted Exchange Server mailboxes then, you can try Exchange Recovery tool.
Root Causes of Poison Mailbox Exchange 2010 & Need to Repair Quarantine mailbox Exchange 2013
There are some situations, when a user is not able to access Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox and declared as a poison mailbox Exchange 2010. Therefore, in this segment, we are going to discuss the several types of events that cause a potential threat to the Exchange mailbox.
- If a thread is working for a particular mailbox and fails, then it takes mailbox in an abnormal state.
- If more than five threads working for a particular mailbox stops simultaneously for more than 60 seconds then also it is not a stable state.
Both of these causes leads to Poison Mailbox Exchange 2010/ 2013. Any mailbox suffering from these two threats then, Exchange Server quarantines the mailbox database.
How to Repair Quarantine Mailbox Exchange 2013/ 2010
In order to fix Quarantine Mailboxes in Exchange 2013/ 2010, one needs to examine registry keys:
- MailboxQuarantineCrashThreshold
It will identify the number of failures that cause the mailbox to be quarantined. By default, it is three. - MailboxQuarantineDurationInSeconds
It will define the amount of time a mailbox remains in quarantines state. By default, the value is six hours.
It means if a mailbox is quarantined at 10:00, then it comes out from quarantine at 16:00. However, a user is not able to access the mailbox between this. Therefore, it is necessary to repair quarantine mailbox Exchange 2013.
Check Mailbox is Quarantined or Not
Now, to check whether the mailbox is quarantined or not run the following commands:
Get-MailboxStatistics UserName | Select DisplayName, IsQuarantined | Format-Table -AutoSize
Now, if IsQuarantined is true, then it is poison mailbox Exchange 2013.
Fix Quarantine Mailbox Exchange 2013/10/16 using cmdlet
Now, to detect and repair quarantine mailbox Exchange use cmdlets that are mentioned below:
1. To detect and repair folder view of the mailbox
New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox abc@lmno.com -CorruptionType FolderView
2. Detect Provisioned Folder and Search Folder Corruption
New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox abc -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder -DetectOnly
3. Fix Aggregate Counts for all mailboxes in mailbox database MBX- DB09
New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database MBX-DB09 -CorruptionType AggregateCounts
4. Repair all type of corruption for a mailbox and archive
New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox abc -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,Folderview -Archive
5. To fix all types of corruption in a mailbox database
New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database $Mailbox.Database1 -StoreMailbox $Mailbox.Mailbox1Guid -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,Folderview
Description of parameters used in above cmdlet:
- Corruption Type: Specify the type of corruption that a user wants to detect and fix.
- Database: Specify the database on which command is to be executed.
- Mailbox: Specify the mailbox on which command is to be executed.
- Archive: Detect the corruption and fix archive mailbox of the specified mailbox.
- DetectOnly: It will specify that a user wants to detect the errors, but not repair them
- StoreMailbox: It specifies the mailbox GUID that a user wants to repair.
Remove Mailbox From Quarantine Exchange 2013 using PowerShell
- Disable-MailboxQuarantine
The default time of mailbox quarantine Exchange 2103 is six hours. After the process to repair quarantine mailbox Exchange 2013, one can disable mailbox quarantine. Run the cmdlet mentioned below to disable poison mailbox Exchange 2010.
Disable-MailboxQuarantine “Alex Smith”
The command will remove the mailbox of a user Alex Smith from quarantine.
Alternative Solution to Fix Quarantine Mailbox Exchange 2010/ 2013
The major limitation of repairing poison mailbox Exchange 2013/ 2010 using PowerShell is that the cmdlets are not available in Exchange 2010. Moreover, the commands are hard to understand and very time-consuming to execute. Therefore, a user can remove corruption from poison mailbox Exchange 2010 and all other versions with the help of a trusted third-party utility i.e. Exchange Recovery. This software quickly recovers mailbox of Exchange Server 2016/ 2013/ 2010 and all below versions.
Conclusion
Whenever there is a corruption in a mailbox or it becomes abnormal and Exchange Server quarantined the mailbox. By default mailbox will be quarantined for six hours and a user is not allowed to access the mailbox. Therefore, to overcome all these problems, one can repair quarantine mailbox Exchange 2013 using PowerShell Disable-MailboxQuarantine commands & using Cmdlet. However, it will repair only Exchange 2013 Mailbox, not for Exchange 2010. In order to resolve quarantine issue in an effortless way and without any limitation, a user can try one third party tool i.e. Exchange Recovery.