When an employee leaves our organization, we assign their mailbox so that it can be accessed by another employee to ensure that we don’t miss any important e-mail messages. After about 60 days we want to set their mailbox so that internet e-mail will be rejected and the sender will receive a “550 No Such User Here” error, but we don’t want to actually delete the mailbox until some future time after we’ve archived it.
I’ve found 2 techniques for doing this:
1 – Set a recipient policy to only receive mail from the terminated user’s account
2 – Set the SMTP address for the mailbox to something that doesn’t actually exist. ie, change msmith@xxx.org to msmith-xx@xxx.org
I’ve adopted technique #2 and it works as far as preventing e-mail from being delivered to the mailbox, but in my testing I’ve yet to see the error come back so that the sender knows they have attempted to mail to a non-existing mailbox. I can’t tell if Exchange 2007 isn’t issuing the error or if the sending mail systems are just throwing it away. I’ve tested sending from a Google Apps E-mail account and from an account at my local cable company.
Anyone have any suggestions? I’ve not been able to come up with anything from numerous internet searches.
