What are the best practices for disabling/deleting mailboxes? 

Environment:

Oracle B2C Service, Oracle hosted mailboxes

Resolution:

Before disabling or deleting any mailbox that accepts incoming email, it is important to address any messages that may exist in the mailbox as well as ensure new messages are not arriving from customers. Deleting a mailbox is permanent and cannot be restored. Any messages that exist in the mailbox at the time of deletion are also removed. 

Below are some tips to prevent the loss of mail:

a. Work with other groups in your organization to understand how a mailbox is used and any impact from disabling or deleting the mailbox.  A mailbox may be used in business rules, workspace rules, customizations, etc.  All areas should be reviewed thoroughly, particularly when deleting a mailbox since the mailbox name will not be visible in menus after it is deleted.

b. Create a report that shows incidents by the incidents.mailbox_id field. This will give an indication of when and if the mailbox was used for service. Move any records associated to the mailbox being disabled/deleted to a valid mailbox.

c. Enable incoming mail on mailboxes that are set for only outgoing mail. This will allow the techmail utility to pull mail and create or update incidents that may otherwise be stuck in the mailbox. Since there may be old mail in the mailbox, it may be useful to first create a rule that moves incidents from the mailbox to a specific queue for isolation from other incidents. If you do not want old messages creating incidents and instead would like information on the messages that currently exist in the mailbox, please submit a Service Request to Ask Technical Support. Once all the messages in the mailbox have been processed or removed, the mailbox can be disabled via Configuration Assistant. Doing so will reject delivery of any further messages to that address and the email client should notify the user of the permanent failure with the address. If this step is not performed, messages sent to the associated address will not be processed, but will continue to accumulate.

Note: If you have disabled incoming mail in Configuration Assistant you must also disable outgoing mail in the product. We do not allow hosted mailboxes to be enabled for outgoing only. Not only could messages continue to be sent using the disabled mailbox, this configuration will also negatively impact bounce handling. If the mailbox you would like to disable outgoing email for is the default mailbox for that interface, the checkbox will be grayed out and you will need to set another mailbox as the default one for that interface before being able to disable outgoing email.