[SOLVED] Office 365 user/mailbox error. At a loss.

[LifelineIT]

Backstory here:
Office converted to Office 365 in ~December, brought over all the existing emails. Cool. I leave that company as full time employee but retained hourly for IT. So they get a brainstorm one day and decide to delete my account and another unused account. I do not know what means they used to do this.

Then they realize that all their publication/etc still shows the unused account, and it was being used, just nobody was checking it. (Genius!)

So they try to remake it and get an error, at this point I'm not sure what the original error was, effectively that it couldn't be created because it already exists. Some googling tells me that we have to yank it out with powershell. NO idea how they deleted it. It would appear they deleted the user but not the mailbox, maybe?

So we powershelled in and ripped out the account, it was still showing active but not active, or something. That's done. Yesterday we tried again to create the account, no joy. Tried to build the mailbox, and it tried...but failed. Getting this error now:
"The proxy address "SMTP:nwvcil@nwvcil.org" is already being used by "nwvcil‎(0FF1CE)‎". Please choose another proxy address.
Exchange: An unknown error has occurred. Refer to correlation ID: c170bbdb-50ea-433a-90aa-2e79dc66a4ee"


DA HELL IS THAT? There are no aliases for that account. Mailbox is gone. The username does not show up when you powershell all accounts, all mailboxes, all aliases...anything. Individual users Office365 installs authenticate at their workstations with their logins.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I know with local exchange servers...sometimes moving "too quickly" with an e-mail address, you can run into issues like that, because behind the scenes, within active directory, the name isn't fully gone from its prior association yet. It can take a while for all the nooks and crannies within active directory to purge out, or get updated.

 

[LifelineIT]

Thanks Stonecat. I thought about that---but the account was removed MONTHS ago and they didn't try to recreate it until MONTHS later. We're now 2 weeks after the force removal with Powershell.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Ahh OK....missed that it was done months ago (saw the December thing but didn't realize the account was whacked back then).
Gimme a bit, think I ran across something similar last fall with a client..but we're tied up right now re-doing our in-house VMware server for N-Central upgrades.

 

[LifelineIT]

No worries, and thanks. I actually just deleted it...again.

So weird. I went to users, errored users, and it was there. So I unassigned its license and deleted it. Then we force deleted it with powershell. Then we re-added it. It let us make the name but now it's returning the SMTP error again:

Exchange: The proxy address "SMTP:nwvcil@nwvcil.org" is already being used by "NAMPR01A005.prod.outlook.com/Microsoft Exchange Hosted Organizations/nwvcil.onmicrosoft.com/nwvcil‎(0FF1CE)‎". Please choose another proxy address.
Exchange: An unknown error has occurred. Refer to correlation ID: 31ef0784-7c8f-44c1-85d3-611179534efb

Not even sure what to do w/ that correlation ID....

 

[LifelineIT]

SOLVED. No thanks to Microsoft support, lol.

Someone, at some time, had created a Distribution Group using the email in question. WHY it allowed them to then delete the user account, I have no idea. WHY it didn't link the two, I don't know. I FINALLY got it to give me a good, useable error message and that showed me where to look.

Here is the helpful error message:
The proxy address "smtp:nwvcil@nwvcil.org" is already being used by the proxy addresses or LegacyExchangeDN of "nwvcil(0FF1CE)". Please choose another proxy address.( The "MailUniversalDistributionGroup" with display name "NWVCIL" is already setup and using the same address.)

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Ahh..distribution group. Yeah you can delete accounts that had the e-mail address after making a distri goup, distri goups are a unique object themselves independent of user accounts.

I stumbled across that so often, finally came across the command to find out what mailbox an alias is bound to
Get-Recipient alias@company.com

 

[LifelineIT]

We actually tried get-recipient, but it didn't help us because we didn't know what the ACTUAL alias was being used, we kept getting that weird symlink nwvcil(OFF1CE)@nwvcil.org alias...which wasn't actually aliased to anything and which didn't exist.

What I don't quite get---are distribution groups INTERNAL only or do they work externally too?