How to Fix “The Migration Mailbox for the Organization is either Missing or Invalid” Error?

In Exchange Server, the New-MigrationBatch command is used to move a mailbox or several mailboxes. Sometimes, when running this command, you may get the following error message or something similar.

“The migration mailbox for the organization is either missing or invalid.”

This issue is caused when the migration mailbox, which is a system mailbox, isn’t enabled or has been deleted. In this case, you need to investigate if the migration mailbox is really configured or was deleted. Once this is determined, you need to take the necessary action and re-enable it. Otherwise, you will not be able to move any mailboxes.

How to Resolve ‘The mailbox for the current organization is either missing or invalid’ Error?

First, identify if the migration mailbox is disabled. For this, open the Active Directory Users & Computers from the Administrative Tools.

By default, the migration mailbox is situated in the Users Organizational Unit in the Active Directory and the name would be like Migration<guid>.

If the mailbox is not enabled, you will notice the arrow down next to it. This means that the account is disabled.

In such a case, you can try to enable the mailbox using the following command in PowerShell.

Enable-Mailbox -Arbitration -Identity "<migration mailbox name>"

This will enable the mailbox of the migration mailbox. Now, run the Set-Mailbox command as given below to activate it.

Set-Mailbox "<migration mailbox name>" -Arbitration -Management:$true

In case the mailbox was deleted by mistake or any other reason, you need to take a different process.

You need the installation media to process this. If it’s not available, then you need to download the ISO file from the partner site or ask the vendor to provide one. Once this is done and the ISO file is mounted, you need to run the setup to prepare the Active Directory and recreate the missing users. You can execute the command from a normal PowerShell window as Administrator or from the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) window.

Setup /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms

Once this is complete, you can run the following commands to re-enable the migration mailbox.

Enable-Mailbox -Arbitration -Identity "<migration mailbox name>"

Set-Mailbox "<migration mailbox name>" -Arbitration -Management:$true

After the setup is complete and successful, you can try to resume the migration batch or create a new migration batch and test accordingly.

To Conclude

To avoid issues during data migration, you can opt for a third-party application. There are a lot of applications available in the market, but one application that stands out is Stellar Converter for EDB. This application can easily do the job with minimal effort and resources. It can be installed on any Windows machine and can open EDB database – be it online or offline. This means that you don’t have to unmount the database to transfer the data.

You can granularly select the mailboxes and export them to PST and other file formats. In this case, you can easily export the mailboxes directly to a live Exchange Server database, with features like automatic mailbox matching, parallel and priority exports, and continuation in case the process is somehow interrupted. The application can be also used to migrate Exchange mailboxes directly to a Microsoft 365 tenant. With this application, you can process user mailboxes, user archives, shared mailboxes, disabled or deleted mailboxes, and public folders.