Exchange online view user mailboxes missing licenses

Posted by FancyBridge_147@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 9 comments

I was getting ready to spin down a tenant and was advised that we stop all of our current licenses in the tenant by our migration vendor. Did that without an issue, then I find out our other vendor who handles our tenant backups says they have no way to get to our data if we delete the full tenant, and advises us to convert all of our user mailboxes to shared mailboxes and just leave the tenant up forever.

When I go to look at my user mailboxes in the Exchange Admin portal, there are none, because we removed all of the licenses. Where can I find them so that I can convert them into shared mailboxes? Or am I gonna have to go one by one and apply a license to a user for 5 minutes so the mailbox shows back up, convert it, and then move on to the next mailbox. The issue is that I have 5 times as many users in Entra as I did with active mailboxes, and no one kept track at all of which users used to have licenses and which ones didn't.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

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Any-Fly5966@reddit

How many accounts are we talking? You could just add the license back and convert to shared. Otherwise, Im sure this can be done with Powershell.

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FancyBridge_147@reddit (OP)

The licenses are gone, we stopped renewing. Management will not let me add them back because we were told we would not need them, and it is out of budget. I just needed a way to identify which users had mailboxes so we can get them converted to shared mailboxes. Found the info in the audit log. I still have no idea how to actually query Exchange Online and see those weird disconnected/unlicensed user mailboxes that sit in the background for 30 days.

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Any-Fly5966@reddit

Get-Mailbox -SoftDeletedMailbox | select Name,RecipientTypeDetails,WhenSoftDeleted,IsInactiveMailbox
#Create Shared Mailbox
$NameSharedMailbox = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter The Shared Mailbox Name"
New-Mailbox -Shared -Name $NameSharedMailbox -DisplayName $NameSharedMailbox -Alias $NameSharedMailbox
$ShareMailboxGetGUID = Get-Mailbox -Identity $NameSharedMailbox

#Pick Deleted Mailbox To Restore
$mailboxtoRestore = Get-Mailbox -SoftDeletedMailbox | Select Name,PrimarySMTPAddress,DistinguishedName | Sort-Object Name | Out-GridView -Title "Current Softdeleted Mailbox List" -PassThru

#Command to restore deleted mailbox to new shared mailbox.
New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SourceMailbox $mailboxtoRestore.DistinguishedName -TargetMailbox $ShareMailboxGetGUID.PrimarySmtpAddress -AllowLegacyDNMismatch

#Grab the restore ID for the one you want progress on.
$RestoreProgress = Get-MailboxRestoreRequest | Select Name,TargetMailbox,Status,RequestGuid | Out-GridView -Title "Restore Request List" -PassThru

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FancyBridge_147@reddit (OP)

Thank you for this. I tried to the command to look at SoftDeletedMailboxes, but there is only 1 listed, and I know we had way more then that. I was able to find who was licensed at least from the Audit logs, but now I have no idea if the mail is already gone. Will be a fun time to argue with my vendors either way. Thanks for the assistance.

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titlrequired@reddit

Sounds odd that the restore process requires a connection to the tenant. Are they misunderstanding your question?

The data they backed up should now be in their system, so whilst a connection to a tenant may allow for direct restore to a mailbox, I’m not seeing why this would be a blocker for future access to already archived data.

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FancyBridge_147@reddit (OP)

Yeah, my management team is having fun with that backup vendor. They completely understand the question, it just sounds like they were never actually making backups (I can't prove it). I just need to make sure that all of the user mailboxes don't disappear before someone tells me exactly what we need to do to keep the mailbox data available. With no licenses on the tenant at all right now, I am just trying to figure out which of my 600 users had licenses previously, so I can figure out if they had a mailbox that I need to migrate. We only had about 125 licenses based on our renewal history, I just have no idea who actually had one.

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titlrequired@reddit

How long ago did you make the changes? You can check the audit log on a user for license changes, so you’d potentially be able to either run an audit log search or use powershell to query the audit log for license changes.

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FancyBridge_147@reddit (OP)

Only about 10 days. The audit log had all of the license changes that got removed when we did not renew. That lets me know who needs to be converted to a shared mailbox to try to keep the mail around. Thank you!

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titlrequired@reddit

Cool.