Azure & Office 365

Today, I had mistakenly created a user account instead of shared mailbox so I wanted to delete and recreate it as a shared mailbox but kept getting error ‘The email address is already being used. Please choose another email address.’

After some research I found that if we want to use the same email address as an alias of our primary account, we have to wait for 30 days prior to the date when deleted. But we have an alternate workaround for same, we can hard delete the email address using below command.

Remove-Mailbox -Identity <Identity> -Permanent $true

So, I opened PowerShell from top right navigation as shown below

If you are running it for the 1st time, it will create a new database to log the powershell command and its output. as shown below

If you don’t have at least contribute access on subscription, you will get error ‘{“error”:{“code”:”AuthorizationFailed”,”message”:”The client ‘UserID’ with object id ‘xxx’ does not have authorization to perform action ‘Microsoft.Resources/subscriptions/resourcegroups/read’ over scope ‘/subscriptions/subscriptionnumber/resourcegroups/cloud-shell-storage-eastus’ or the scope is invalid. If access was recently granted, please refresh your credentials.”}}

Note : Microsoft is updating few policies so few command including this one may not work for all tenants so use the alternate method mentioned below

Or

You can even run PowerShell from your local machine as shown below:

Now you can use below command and remove the mailbox, now you should be able to create the Shared mailbox without any error.

Remove-Mailbox -Identity <Identity> -PermanentDelete $true

Article from:
Inderjeet Singh Jaggi

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