Comments on: Ghost Account

By: ouobacrsbf

ouobacrsbf — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:22:39 +0000

Don’t use Message Tracking center because it mainly allow you to find messages, i dont think it can significanty show us which user exist or not.But let use AD and the Container Mailboxes in Your Storage Group(by default First Storage Group under the name of you Server) from Exchange System manager to solve problem, it should may simplify the problem. When you go to Mailboxes container, do you see the user1′s mailbox?user2′s mailbox? have you many Organisations Units(OU) in your AD? if this case, it’s possible that the user have been moved to another OU in wich it is hidden. Second thing, remenber that you can delete an user without his mailbox from AD and create an user without a mailbox…read correctly options when you are creating or deleting an user. Also remenber that you can do all the exchange tasks from AD. if you are unable to find a user from AD and the mailbox from Mailboxes container,it possible that this objet is hidden or there is a problem with you exchange database. In this case, the tool that im taking about is ESEUTIL and ISINTEG. ESEUTIL is a tool to defragment your exchange database,to check their integity and to repair a damaged database. BUT you have to be sur that your database has a problem and make a full backup before to execute the command. ESEUTIL is located in the EXCHSRVR|BIN directory. For more information go to MSEXCHANGE.ORG. I’m sure that if you use correctly AD and the Maiboxes container, you’ll solve the problem.

By: humbleapprentice

humbleapprentice — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:47:35 +0000

Thank you for the information Serendipity but even when I look for one day a popup will ask me to specify which accout I want. In that popup to “user1″s are listed The one who’s email was changed in the past (as you said and that is the so called “ghost” account) and the new one. In the last reply to my question there was sometihng about a tool, do anybody know what this tool is or what is its name? I just want to get rid of all the accounts and specially the ghost one, please help me!!.

Thank you all,

humbleapprentice

By: serendipity

serendipity — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:18:12 +0000

The Message Tracking Center reads and reports from log files of messages sent and received. It sounds like you have changed the e-mail address for user1 at some point in time. Depending on the dates you have entered in the message tracking search, you could be seeing messages that were received by user1 for both of his e-mail addresses.

By: humbleapprentice

humbleapprentice — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 11:42:59 +0000

Thanks for your help guys. Dear ouobacrsbf, what tool do you mean? Could you please provide me the name or the link where it can be found? I looked in Microsoft’s website but I couldn’t find anything that will resemble what you where talking about.

Thank you again. It does not make much sense for this thing to happen.

By: ouobacrsbf

ouobacrsbf — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 09:35:59 +0000

What your are seeing from Exchange Sytem manager are your two Users mailboxes,not users themselves…this kind of things often occurs in Exchange database, u can use a tool provide by microsoft to compact and remove these ghost users…use google, you will find the tool.

By: brontvain

brontvain — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:30:21 +0000

maybe if you enable the advanced properties in AD, you will see the hidden containers where these users might be hosted.
also, you can manually the mailbox management process in the exchange mmc…

By: humbleapprentice

humbleapprentice — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:46:52 +0000

Thank you petroleumman,

I did delete the mailbox from Exchange and purged it together with the AD account. See, what it should do when an email comes to “user1″ it gets forwarded to a external user account (it’s like any email that goes to user1@my-domain.com gets forwarded to user2@hotmail.com, where “user2″ is an AD user with an external email account). So what I did is deleted and purged “user1″‘s account and mailbox and deleted “user2″‘s (or “receiver”‘s) account from AD. Now, the old “user1″ was created a long time ago and is impossible to find and delete. You can see it when using “Message Tracking Center” but you won’t see it under any mailbox store in the server. Is there a way to find it and delete it? Or at least, is there a way to clean up Exchange from accounts that are not tight up to AD?

Thank you all again,