We came across an issue recently where a customer was unable to change his auto- attendant greeting file without being presented the following error message.

“Failed

Error:

An error occurred while accessing the custom prompt publishing point. The discovery mailbox, a hidden default mailbox that is required to search mailboxes, can’t be found. It may have been inadvertently deleted. This mailbox must be re-created before you can search mailboxes.

The discovery mailbox, a hidden default mailbox that is required to search mailboxes, can’t be found. It may have been inadvertently deleted. This mailbox must be re-created before you can search mailboxes.”

The first thing we did was to check to see if the hidden mailbox was in fact not there/deleted. We checked this by running the following command in the EMS “get-mailbox –arbitration”. This resulted in no results , we had expected to see “SystemMailbox{e0dc1c29-89c3-4034-b678-e6c29d823ed9}”.

To recreate this mailbox we did the following

1. Logged onto mail server where Exchange SP1 media was stored
2. Browsed to Exchange sp1 media via command prompt
3. Ran the following command “setup.com /preparead” (Please note this did not incur any downtime, or halt of mails being sent/received)
4. We then had to enable the mailbox with the following command “Enable-Mailbox “SystemMailbox{e0dc1c29-89c3-4034-b678-e6c29d823ed9}” –Arbitration”

 We were then able to change the greeting file