Exchange 2016: Create User Mailbox

Creating a Mailbox in Exchange is an extremely easy process. There are 3 types of mailboxes that can be created and they are for Users, Shared and Resource types. Exchange 2016 also offers the ability to create “Linked Mailboxes” which are essentially associated to external accounts should a Domain trust relationship exist with the current domain. User Mailboxes are of course the most used ones followed by Shared Mailboxes and the Resource Mailboxes which can be further created as Room or Equipment types.

Exchange offers the ability to create these mailboxes either by using the ECP page or even more conveniently with PowerShell commands. Very useful for creating and managing objects in batches. This article will cover both methods. In addition doesn’t matter if the Mailbox will be associated to existing users of Active Directory. Should this be the case the non-existing users will be automatically created in Active Directory irrespective of the method used.

Creating a User Mailbox using the Exchange ECP page

Let’s use the + button to create a new User Mailbox

The wizard offers the option to either create a mailbox for an existing user in Active Directory or create a new one providing the necessary details

As soon as the information are submitted the mailbox is created as per screenshot below

By issuing the Get-Mailbox command we can also see the new user mailbox created

Equally it appears in the Active Directory the User with populated entries

Creating a User Mailbox using PowerShell

Using the ECP page to create and manage single objects is quite handy but if we are dealing with the management of multiple objects at the same time then this is an area where PowerShell can show one of its main pluses

The following is just a simple example showing the creation of a User Mailbox with the out of the box cmd-lets. Let’s say we want to create a mailbox for a new user not existing in Active Directory yet Ideally we can also provide a CSV file with all the necessary information and execute PowerShell commands in batch. This can be accomplished in 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Let’s create a variable for the Password

$password = Read-Host “Enter password” -AsSecureString