[Exchange Online] Get-Mailbox does not return all mailboxes

Question

_{Tuesday, July 18, 2017 12:55 PM}

Hi everybody,

I came around a strange behavior of the Get-Mailbox cmd-let. First of all, I'm connected to an Exchange Online tenant ; not to an on-premises server.

When I'm executing "Get-mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited" ; some **users **mailboxes are not returned by the cmdlet...

Here is exactly what I did for demonstration :
[Here normally goes a beautiful screenshot of my Powershell but I'm too much of a padawan to be authorized -_-]

PS > Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | ?{$_.Alias -eq 'suraidi.doe'} | ft Name,Alias,serverName,recipienttypedetails
PS > Get-Mailbox suraidi.doe | ?{$_.Alias -eq 'suraidi.doe'} | ft Name,Alias,serverName,recipienttypedetails

Name                          Alias                         ServerName                    RecipientTypeDetails
*                                                                     *
Suraidi Doe                suraidi.doe                 db6pr0101mb2502               UserMailbox

PS >

As you can see, when I request explicitly the mailbox ; it shows up. When I get (supposedly) ALL the mailboxes ; it does not.

I purposely used the same filtering for both cmd-let even if it's useless for the second line, to demonstrate it is not an error at this level. After some tests, I have ~40 users that do not show up over ~3000. So far, I can't find any specific common point between those users ; they all seems to be perfectly regular mailboxes...

Edit :

Further testing showed that Get-Mailbox * ; with the wildcard explicitly given, has a different behavior :

PS > $mailboxes = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited
PS > $mailboxes2 = Get-Mailbox * -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited
PS > $mailboxes.Count
3039
PS > $mailboxes2.Count
3059

Strange isn't it ?

Is there anybody who can enlighten me on this behavior ? Someone already runs in it, maybe ?

Regards,
Jérémie

All replies (5)

_{Tuesday, July 18, 2017 2:13 PM}

About  suraidi.doe   mailbox , is that inactive or disabled or active.

I was unable to find the difference between get-mailbox  with *  or without *

*I am guessing that it might include disabled or soft deleted or inactive mailboxes too. Can you confirm , if possible. *

S_K_P

_{Tuesday, July 18, 2017 5:14 PM}

You could try using the -IgnoreDefaultScope command.  Sometimes, if you have more than one domain, the Get-Mailbox command will only search the domain you are logged into.

Or you could try Set-ADServerSettings -viewEntireForest $true.  You would run this first, and then run your get-mailbox cmdlets.

Jan

_{Tuesday, July 18, 2017 6:10 PM | 1 vote}

There was an ongoing issue with this on MS side, incident EX107042. It's supposed to be fixed now, but if you can reliably reproduce the issue, open a support request.

Issue description below:

Title: Problem viewing mailboxes and address books

User Impact: Users and admins were unable to view some mailboxes and address lists within the Outlook client and Outlook on the web.

More info: Admins were also unable to view all mailboxes listed in the Exchange admin center using the PowerShell Get-Mailbox command. However, admins could view all mailboxes by using the PowerShell command: get-mailbox * -resultsize unlimited
This command would present extra mailboxes not normally displayed, such as arbitration mailboxes. While we worked to resolve this issue, admins could trigger a sync to fix a specific mailbox that was not displaying correctly by updating one of its properties (such as display name).

Final status: We completed deployment of the fix, which prevented any further mailboxes from becoming impacted. We also completed running scripts to fix up any mailboxes that were affected by the issue, so that they will now appear as expected.

Scope of impact: A few customers reported this issue, and our analysis indicated that the problem could occur for users that made updates or changes to a mailbox's properties between June 14th and June 23rd.

Start time: Wednesday, June 14, 2017, at 12:00 AM UTC

End time: Wednesday, July 5, 2017, at 9:30 PM UTC

Preliminary root cause: A code defect caused impact to systems and cmdlets that process directory information and affected the ability to view some address lists and mailboxes.

Next steps:
- We're reviewing our update procedures to help catch this kind of problem during our testing cycle.

_{Monday, August 14, 2017 8:52 AM}

Hi, Jérémie R

Are the suggestions above helpful for you? If you have any further problems, please let us know.

Best Regards,

Lynn-Li
TechNet Community Support

Please remember to mark the replies as answers.
If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].

_{Monday, August 14, 2017 8:56 AM}

Thx Vasil for your answer. It looks like my problem indeed.

I don't know if it was supposed to be temporary or not, but today I seems to run in the issue again (on a scheduled script that I forgot to change to Get-Mailbox *). As I can go around the problem by adding the wildcard, I will not bother with a ticket though.

Regards,
Jérémie