Check and Remove Quarantined Mailboxes from Exchange 2013/2016

During the weekend, I experienced an issue whereby the drive holding the Exchange Database filed up. All the mailboxes that were within these databases went unresponsive giving me a major issue. I promptly went ahead and created more space and mounted the databases but some of the mailboxes’ status did not change. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the unresponsive mailboxes status was changed to quarantine. I would like to provide you with steps to resolve the issue associated with quarantined mailboxes associated to exchange 2013/16.

In order to check for quarantined mailboxes, you need to run the below command:

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | Where {$_.IsQuarantined –eq $True}

If you would like to check a single mailbox for quarantine, you need to run the below command:

Get-MailboxStatistics "User_Name" | fl IsQuarantined

In order to release the user from quarantine, you need to run the below command:

Disable-MailboxQuarantine "User_Name"

In order to remove the user from quarantine manually, you need to browse to the below Registry location and delete the identity associated with the account. This step also applies to Archives for user mailboxes:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<ServerName>\Private-{dbguid}\QuarantinedMailboxes\{mailbox guid}

At times, the issue might be caused by a corrupt mailbox in which case you shall run the below command to repair the mailbox:

New-MailboxRepairRequest -mailbox "User_Name" -corruptiontype Aggregatecounts,searchfolder,provisionedfolder,folderview

Thank you for taking the time to read the article and are more than welcome to leave a comment below.