Emails stuck in Local Delivery queue on SBS 2003

After completing a VMWare ESXi 4 restore of an SBS 2003 server I discovered that one user could not receive any emails from internally or externally. They all backed up in the 'Local delivery' queue that you can see in the Exchange System Manager. The user could however send mails and receive junk oddly.

I read that this was down to the Mailbox Store being corrupted which I really did not want to have to restore. It turns out just that mailbox was corrupted in some way so that would have been a lot of extra work for one mailbox.

You're not really supposed to be able to delete mailboxes and re-create them in SBS as its tightly woven into creating new users but this was my only option. Here's how to delete the users mailbox, recreate it and hopefully get mails flowing again as it worked for me!

1. Open Outlook from the user account that is having the problems and export all mails to a .pst file. Remember to select the Mailbox and include subfolders.

2. Open Active Directory Computers & Users, right click on the user account and choose Exchange tasks. Choose Delete Mailbox. (default SBS container - yourdomain\MyBusiness\Users\SBSUsers)

3. From Exchange System Manager, in the left pane, right click on the mailbox container and choose Run Cleanup Agent. Then in the right pane, right click on the users mailbox ( it will now have an X next to it ) and choose Purge. (default SBS container - Servers\yourservername\FirstStorageGroup\MailboxStore\Mailboxes)

4. From Active Directory Computers & Users, right click on the user account and choose Exchange tasks. Choose Create Mailbox.

5. Finally import the mailbox from the .pst file you created in the first step from within Outlook.

Information taken from this post:
http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/84-174069

After these steps I found when opening Outlook I received the message "Your mailbox has been temporarily moved on Microsoft Exchange Server".

To get around this you have to recreate your Mail profile.

1. From the Control Panel open 'Mail'.

2. Select 'Show Profiles'

3. Remove the 'Default' profile (assuming you only have that profile).

4. Add a new profile called 'Default' and let the Mail control panel find your users mailbox.

Problem solved!