My article for Simple-Talk on mailbox and personal archive deletion, recovery and purging in Exchange 2010 has been published on Simple Talk.

The article is about:

• The relationships between Active Directory and Mailboxes and Archives in the store;
• Mailbox Retention;
• Deleting and Recovering a Mailbox
• Deleting and Recovering a Personal Archive
• Linked Mailboxes
• Cleanup

You can check out the article, titled Connecting the Disconnected in Exchange 2010, at:
http://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/exchange/connecting-the-disconnected-in-exchange-2010/

Note: I submitted the following additional SP1 info to the publisher so this information might be included in the article at some point.

Since writing the article SP1 was released which contains a new cmdlet to purge mailboxes, Remove-StoreMailbox. This is also great for situations when you’ve moved a lot of mailboxes and you need to make that space available in the source database (when moved, mailboxes are soft-deleted). Usage is as follows:

Remove-StoreMailbox -Database <DatabaseID> -Identity <MailboxID> -MailboxState [Disabled|SoftDeleted]

For example, to remove pmortimer’s mailbox from database DB1 after moving it elsewhere, use:

Remove-StoreMailbox –database DB1 –identity pmortimer –MailboxState SoftDeleted

The command to remove all SoftDeleted mailboxes from database DB1 would be:

Get-MailboxStatistics -Database DB1 | where {$_.DisconnectReason -eq “SoftDeleted”} | foreach {Remove-StoreMailbox -Database $_.database -Identity $_.mailboxguid -MailboxState SoftDeleted}

The new Remove-StoreMailbox cmdlet also enables us to use single command for removing all disconnected mailboxes:

Get-MailboxStatistics –Database DB1 | Where-Object {$_.DisconnectReason –eq “Disabled”} | ForEach {Remove-StoreMailbox –Database $_.database –identity $_.mailboxguid –MailboxState Disabled