Hi, I've this IT manager user having two different accounts. 1. Regular account with mailbox assigned and email address exposed in Address lists. 2. An administrative account without any mailbox associated. Server: Exchange server 2007 Now the online GAL is showing two entries for this user one is with valid email address entry like username@domain.com the other one is a object ID {DBB97B5E910D4B4F8C6FABD4D1A86A6B}not a valid email address. Its a manager user; how could i possibly remove the 2nd invalid entry from GAL. Any help is appreciated. Shah

That's strange only mail enabled objects will show up in the GAL, was this account ever associated with a mailbox or an email address in the past? It's possible it could've been provisioned as one in the past and wasn't de-provisioned correctly meaning not all mail enabled attributes were removed. In any case you can fire up adsiedit.msc from the run command, expand your domain, expand the ou, and find the user and properties. Find showinaddressbook and delete all the values. Also check msExchHideFromAddressLists and set to true. If you see a number of msexch*attributes with values then it appears it was at one point a mail enabled object and probably wasn't deprovisioned correctly.James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Hi James, Thanks for quick response. Yes there was a milabox created in the past and associated with the administrative account of that user. That mailbox didn't exist any more. The workaround I did; created another test mailbox, associated it with the administrative account, while hiding it to appear from GAL, disabled the mailbox. After taking above steps; when checking a fresh view of GAL the other entry disappeared. Consideration: 1. Could that disabled mailbox be of any unforseen issue in future? Should it be removed? 2. Should I still do ADSI edit msexchange* attributes removal for this administrative account? Thanks.

Hi, Hiding the mailbox from GAL will not cause other issues. But it is not the best resolution. I recommend you remove the values of the msexchange* attributes (including showinaddressbook). of the user acccount. Then exchange should not add this user into the GAL after updating the GAL. Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. Thanks Gen Lin-MSFT

Hi, how is this old object presented in Exchange? Is it MailUser? If so, just simple disable-mailuser will do. RegardsZbynk