Today, I read through the support thread of one guy who ended up paying to a customer support from MS to get rid of a nasty Exchange server.
And, I must admit, it is not something that can be removed with ease.
! The following manual will help you to annihilate the Exchange server and its data. If you still wish to save some of it, don’t use this instruction.
Let’s say, you need to completely wipe it out from the machine – and uninstaller always fails to remove so-called Default Mailboxes.
There are a few types of them which you need to take care of manually:
Get-Mailbox -Archive | Disable-Mailbox Get-Mailbox -Monitoring | Disable-Mailbox Get-Mailbox -AuditLog | Disable-Mailbox Get-Mailbox -PublicFolder | Disable-Mailbox
Now, you need to get rid of “-Arbitration” mailbox but it is not as easy as previous cases. Firstly, go and find out the name of your Mailbox Database:
Get-MailboxDatabase
It will show you something like “Mailbox Database 12212842873428”. Use the entire name, no0t just a number! Now, you can remove all Arbitration mailboxes:
Get-MailboxDatabase -Database "NAME FROM THE PREVIOUS COMMAND" -Arbitration | Disable-Mailbox -Arbitration
It will fail at the last mailbox which is using some default address book (are you still following the actual meaning of these error messages? Not sure if it is physically possible…)
So, to remove the default Offline Address Book we need to get its name. At least, this is what the support says. Forget the support, use the wild card!
Remove-OfflineAddressBook -Identity "*"
And finally:
Get-Mailbox -Database "NAME" -Arbitration | Disable-Mailbox -Arbitration -DisableLastArbitrationMailbox
Phew, that was it. Now, nothing can stop you from wiping out the Exchange server from your server.
Cloud Application Security 