Discovery Mailbox In Exchange 2010…

Exchange 2010 setup creates a special mailbox (discovery mailbox) with a display name “Discovery Search Mailbox” by default. You might be wondering what this mailbox does.

This mailbox is a used as the target mailbox for discovery searches in the exchange control panel. Discovery search comes in when your company auditor or HR wants to search for emails across all the mailboxes.

Few points to note about discovery mailboxes:

• You can create additional discovery mailboxes as required.
• A discovery mailbox can’t be converted to another type of mailbox.
• You can remove a discovery mailbox using the same procedure used to remove other types of mailboxes.
• Although visible in exchange address lists, users cannot send email to a discovery mailbox. Email delivery to discovery mailboxes is prohibited by using delivery restrictions.

• Like all mailbox types, a discovery mailbox has an associated Active Directory user account, but it is disabled by default.

• If you remove a discovery mailbox, all search results stored in the mailbox are removed.
• By default, discovery mailboxes have a mailbox storage quota of 50Gb. You can modify the quota to suit your requirements.

In order to create a new discovery mailbox named Discovery Mailbox1, run

New-Mailbox –identity “Discovery Mailbox1” –Discovery –UserPrincipalName “discoverymailbox1@mydomain.com”

In order to get a list of all discovery mailbox, run

Get-Mailbox -Filter { RecipientTypeDetails -eq "DiscoveryMailbox" }