Q. When I try to perform a mailbox move, why do I get errors with accounts that have whitespace in the Name or DisplayName?

A. If there are leading or trailing spaces in the Name or DisplayName of an account being moved, you’ll receive an error like this when you try to move the mailbox: WARNING: The Name (or DisplayName) property contains leading or trailing whitespace, which must be removed.

To solve the problem, you could manually edit the problematic object, or you can use an Exchange Management Shell (EMS) command to fix a specific user. Here’s an EMS command example that removes leading and trailing spaces from the DisplayName property:

get-mailbox -identity  | Foreach { Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.Identity -DisplayName $_.DisplayName.Trim() }

This PowerShell command removes leading and trailing spaces from the Name property:

get-mailbox -identity  | Foreach { Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.Identity -Name $_.Name.Trim() }

You could run these commands for all users by removing the "-identity <user alias>" part, but you should do so only if you’ve tested the commands thoroughly on individual accounts, so that no negative side-effects occur. Here’s an example of a test command:

get-mailbox | Foreach { Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.Identity -DisplayName $_.DisplayName.Trim() }

End of Article