Exchange 2010: Mailbox Quarantined

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What is Mailbox Quarantine?

Mailbox quarantine is a feature in the Exchange Server 2010 information store. Based on values in the registry, the store detects a mailbox or mailboxes that have the potential to or have caused the store to crash and quarantines them for a specific period. The mailboxes that have the potential to crash the store are called Poisoned Mailboxes.

Scenario:

User A tries to open up their mailbox in Outlook and receives the following error:

https://collaborationpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Quarantine2-300x118.png

User A then tries to access his/her mailbox from OWA and receives the following error:

https://collaborationpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Quarantine1-300x123.png

On the backend, if you try and move the mailbox to a different database it fails with a MAPI exception error.

Solution:

Open the Exchange Management Shell and run the following command to retrieve the GUID of this quarantined mailbox.

  • get-mailbox statistics -identity <user> | fl

Now open up regedit and navigate to the following key:

  • HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSexchangeIS\Servername\Private-dbguid\Quarantined Mailboxes\ {Mailbox guid}.

Expand the key until you see the GUID for the mailbox on the right-hand side.

You will also see the count of crashes.

Remove the entry with the GUID on the right-hand side.

Open up an elevated prompt on the Exchange Server and then perform an IISReset.

Once complete, give it a few minutes for everything to start up again. Now try access the mailbox and it should login fine.

You can also perform a mailbox repair. In this case, it was done and it fixed a few errors. Since then no more entries logged in Regedit.