Configure User Mailbox in Exchange Server 2013MustBeGeek

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After installing and configuring Exchange 2013 you have to create recipients to be able to send and receive emails. There are different types of recipients in Exchange 2013. Different type of recipients are created and used for different purpose. A recipient is any mail-enabled object in Active Directory. It is important to understand different types of recipient before you configure user mailbox in Exchange Server 2013. In this post, I will create user mailbox of existing user account of active directory.

Following are different types of recipient in Exchange 2013,

Mailbox: Mailbox recipient can be user mailbox or linked mailbox. User mailbox is associated with active directory user account. In this post, we will create a user mailbox. Linked mailbox is associated with user account residing in separate trusted forest. The diagram below shows components of linked mailbox.
Image Source: Microsoft
Groups: Groups can be distribution group, security group and dynamic distribution group.
Resources: Resources recipient can be equipment mailbox or room mailbox. These are mostly used for scheduling purpose of the company assets like meeting room, projectors, etc.
Contacts: Contact recipients can be mail contact or mail user. Mail contact is a active directory contact that is mail enabled. Mail user is an active directory user that can log into active directory domain but has an external email address.
Shared: With shared recipient, single mailbox can be used by multiple users. This type of recipient can be very handy for accounts like, info@mustbegeek.com, contact@mustbegeek.com, and so on.

Configure User Mailbox in Exchange Server 2013

While creating new mailbox for the existing active directory user, various mail attributes are added to user’s object in Active Directory. The diagram below shows components of Mailbox. If you delete a mailbox from Exchange server, the user associated with the mailbox is also deleted from active directory. To delete only the mailbox and retain user account, just disable the particular mailbox in Exchange server.

Image Source: Microsoft

Enough with the information. Let’s create some mailboxes now. Open the Exchange Admin center.

Select recipient in features pane. Click mailboxes tab. Click add and select user mailbox option.

Choose Existing user option and click browse. This means, mailbox will be created for user account which is already in active directory. If you want to create mailbox for user account that is not in active directory then, choose new user and start filling all the boxes. This process will create user account in active directory. So it’s the same thing either way.

Select the user for whom you want to create mailbox. Click OK. As you can see above, the organization unit is also shown where this user reside. It is under Management OU> Users OU.

If you want different alias or different SMTP name for this mailbox, then you can configure it here on alias section. If left blank, the SMTP name will be the user logon name as explained in my earlier article. Click save to create the mailbox.

You can now see the mailbox. The SMTP name is DShields@mustbegeek.com which is also the user logon name. In this way you can create mailbox for active directory user. The user can log in to https://mail.mustbegeek.com/owa as I have already created CNAME record for mail.mustbegeek.com in my internal DNS server. Now configure external and internal URLs for various services to be able to access emails properly. But to be able to send and receive emails you have to configure send and receive connectors.