Exchange 2013 mailbox forwarding even though it's disabled

Question

I had a user which had his email forwarded to gmail.com. Latly i disabled that option via ECP and it has no such settings as forwarding. But then his emails never get into his mailbox.

HARED... SMTP     test@poland.pl                   {account@reprezenta... T34
RECEIVE  SMTP     test@poland.pl                   {account@reprezenta... T34
RESOLVE  ROUTING  test@poland.pl                   {Account@rs.pl}             T34
REDIRECT AGENT    test@poland.pl                   {Account@rs.pl}             T34
EXPAND   AGENT    test@poland.pl                   {account.r@gmail.com}           T34
AGENT... AGENT    test@poland.pl                   {Account@rs.pl, account... T34
RESUBMIT AGENT    test@poland.pl                   {Account@rs.pl, account... T34
DROP     ROUTING  test@poland.pl                   {account.r@gmail.com}           T34
AGENT... AGENT    test@poland.pl                   {account.r@gmail.com}           T34

And this is with forwarding disabled. Yet if i go again to ECP and I see this message:

If the fields are empty when I am setting them up why show this message?

I can confirm now with:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.ForwardingAddress -ne $null}

Name                      Alias                ServerName       ProhibitSendQuota
----                      -----                ----------       -----------------
Account           account           exchange      Unlimited

But I've even run following command:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.ForwardingAddress -ne $null} | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingAddress $null -De
liverToMailboxAndForward $false
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.ForwardingAddress -ne $null}

No results. I go into GUI the forwarding address is cleaned.

I set it again just for test and again message about forwarding email being there.

So what's wrong? It's Exchange 2013 -> Version 15.0 (Build 775.38). So CU3.

Answer 1

So i went further with this investigation. The thing here to check was: forwardingsmtpaddress which wasn't empty.

get-mailbox -Identity account | fl alias, forwardingaddress, forwardingsmtpaddress

Which seems to stay set even thou it was disabled via GUI. After I cleaned it up it started working correctly. Why would GUI unchecking and even powershell commands not work as they should when forwardingsmtpaddress is a bit over my head. It seems to be a bug in Exchange 2013 CU3 as far as I can tell.

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.ForwardingAddress -ne $null} | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingAddress $null -ForwardingSmtpAddress $null -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $false 

This cleaned it up (although it only works when forwarding was enabled). I would be happy to know why this is why it is. I did some checking and it seems the field forwardingsmtpaddress doesn't get set when setting up contact forwarding so why was it set this time. Oh well. Hopefully someone will find it useful.