Software/Hardware used:
I found the answer I was looking for in TechNet: How to recover a purged mailbox from an online backup using the original database server.
This fix is for EX2007 – not sure if it was the same for EX 2003….”When you delete a user account and the related mailbox, the mailbox is retained as a disconnected mailbox according to the retention setting”
If you recreate the user account in AD, you should then be able to go into Exchange Management Console, expand the Recipient Configuration Node, and find the Disconnected Mailbox node. Look for the user name you want, right-click and choose Connect – which will start a wizard. On the mailbox settings page select Existing User, and your recreated account should be there to attach to – just make sure you don’t associate any mailbox to it while you are recreating the account.
Hope this helps!
The answer from AndreaF doesn’t seem to apply to Exchange 2003, especially if the AD account has been deleted longer ago than the retention period for the mailbox. I’m having the same problem, not being able to recover a mailbox for an account that was deleted a long time ago. I have restored the Exchange database containing the old mailbox to a Recovery Storage Group and created an account with the same user name in Active Directory. ExMerge does not work for mailboxes in a database that has been restored to a Recovery Storage Group. Exchange doesn’t recognize the newly created account as the same account, and won’t merge or copy the restored mailbox contents to the new account’s mailbox. I’m urgently in need of an answer to this, so any help would be appreciated. Thanks!