[SOLVED] We Are Preparing a Mailbox For The User [2020]

I struggled with an office 365 mailbox issue in a Hybrid environment where a user had the Exchange Online Plan 2 license but received the error that we are preparing a mailbox for the user. I waited for 4 days and tried some steps but unfortunately none of them worked. I was able to fix the error and would like to discuss the same in this article.

I had accessed connect-msolservice module and ensured that no errors on the user account. The command that I used to check the status is below. It’s worth to clear any errors when troubleshooting the mailbox issues.

(Get-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName user@techieberry.com).errors[0].ErrorDetail.objecterrors.errorrecord.ErrorDescription

The command normally shows any errors on a user account from Azure AD. Thankfully, no errors on the affected mailbox. Also, verified that no email address conflicts and all seems to be ok.

I even tried the Redo-MsolProvisionUser command to see if it makes any difference but in vain. Redo-MsolProvisionUser retries the provisioning of a user object in Azure Active Directory.

I decided to try different steps and it worked.

• Go to “Exchange On-Premise“
• Access “Exchange Management Shell“
• Disable the affected mailbox.
  Note: I strongly advise not to use remove-mailbox as they remove the AD account that is associated with a mailbox. It is recommended to use the disable command.

• I waited for the changes to replicate. After sync, the account had no mailbox in the cloud but it was listed in the soft-deleted which is normal.
• After that, enabled the on-premise object again using the Enable-Mailbox command.
  Note: If no AD account available, the Enable-mailbox command will not work.

• After the sync is completed, initiated migration to Exchange Online from on-premise and assign a respective license.
• Guess what. After the migration is completed, we are preparing a mailbox for the user error is disappeared.

Yes, we should move a data from a soft-deleted mailbox otherwise the user would kill me so performed mailbox restore request to the active mailbox.

To get more information, visit Microsoft website.

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