When “user doesn’t have a mailbox” on Office 365 portal but has one in Exchange admin, how to correct it

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Background: An Office 365 user was deleted and then recovered. Exactly which steps were taken is not clear

Now: This user is now attempting to login to OWA and it says, translated from Romanian, "Something did not work, the mailbox is not available. The cause could be that the licence of the mailbox has expired."

In the Office 365 portal under USERS => Active Users, a selected user shows a Primary email address of This user doesn’t have an Exchange mailbox. They are assigned a valid licence ("Exchange Online Plan 1" – old but cheap and gives us what we need!)

Going into ADMIN => Exchange => recipients => mailboxes, I can select the user and edit them and view their mailbox usage ("213.61 MB used, 0% of 49.5 GB") and the last logon time (which was from before they were initially deleted). This suggests to me that the mailbox exists but Office 365 has lost track of it.

I suspect the user was recovered in the Exchange admin center and not via the Office 365 Portal. Regardless, I now need to fix the issue. In this instance it would be acceptable to lose the existing mailbox. Any ideas?

Best Answer

Oh man, what a mess, lets see.

The process of restoring a mailbox depends on how the mailboxes was originally deleted:

  • Mailbox deleted by means of removing the Exchange License: applying an Exchange license to the user would simply reactivate the mailbox in this case, here is the correct way to do that.
  • Mailbox deleted by means of deleting the original user account: recreating the user account in this case with the same mailbox ID/SMTP proxy settings will force Exchange to restore the mailbox to the user. here is the correct way to do that.

If none of those options worked, then I'd recommend you to complete delete the mailbox even from Recycle Bin and start all fresh, as follow:

  1. If the user is DirSynced/Federated, start by removing the user mapping so the mailbox is not connected to an Active Directory account.
  2. If the mailbox has a user account online, delete that account too.
  3. In Office 365 Admin Portal > Users > Deleted Users, verify that you can see the mailbox you want to fix (if it's not in the deleted users tap, it's still linked to an account then, verify user mapping and remove as needed)
  4. Connect Powershell to Office 365: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn975125.aspx
  5. Delete the mailbox from Recycle Bin using this command:

Remove-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName "Username" -Force -RemoveFromRecycleBin

  1. Recreate the user account/mailbox as needed.

Hope this helps.

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