Can a user account that is disabled in Active Directory still receive email?

I'm reading Learning Exchange Server 2003 by Boswell, and there's a section in there that mentions that a disabled account in AD cannot receive email and that it will be bounced back. Currently, what usually happens when a person leaves our company is that the account gets disabled, moved to an archive OU, and the email is forwarded on the Exchange General tab to someone else. It appears to have been working all this time, but I'm wondering why the book would say otherwise... We are using a single Exchange 2003 SP2 server.

Under what circumstances would a disabled user account cease to receive email?

Solution 1:

This has thrown me for a loop in the past as well, as I had read (and experienced) this first hand. The answer is that Microsoft changed the behaviour of store.exe with 2 hotfixes.

The 2 hotfixes that modify this behavior is 916783 and 903158.

More information on the change can be found : http://www.microsoftnow.com/2007/10/disabled-users-continue-to-receive-mail.html