We have one Exchange mailbox that has seen exponential growth with no good workaround to be had. I started worrying when we passed 100 GB for the single box, and by 160 GB users started getting properly annoyed by the performance when browsing the box. I spoke to the manager for the department and suggested exporting the data to a number of archive files that could be manually accessed by select users.
The basic command
As usual, for this kind of task we want to reach for our CLI. The command to copy data to a .PST is New-MailboxExportRequest. A typical use case for a small box could look something like this:
New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox "MailboxName" -Name JobIdentifier -FilePath \\servername\path\filename.pstTwo notes:
1) The Name of the job is how we may reference it later on. It doesn’t have to make sense, but in case we create multiple jobs our lives get easier if they have sane names.
2) The FilePath argument must point at a UNC share where the domain group Exchange Trusted Subsystem has Modify rights. Avoid writing to a system or database volume directly on the mail server, or bad things may happen when the volume fills up.
Advanced parameters
We will undoubtedly want to create more advanced queries, though. In the case of my giant mailbox, it makes sense to split the contents chronologically. The ContentFilter parameter can be made advanced enough if we want to:
New-MailboxExportRequest -ContentFilter {(((Sent -gt '2016-08-01') -and (Sent -lt '2016-10-01')) -or ((Received -gt '2016-08-01') -and
(Received -lt '2016-10-01')))} -Mailbox "MailboxName" -Name MailboxAugToSep2016dump -IsArchive -FilePath \\servername\path\filename.pstTo break the command down:
1) We want to filter for both the Sent and the Received properties of our mails, since we want to catch not only mails that were received during the period, but also outbound mail from the time.
2) Since we use the “greater than” and “less than” parameters, it’s good to know how they work in the case of dates: When written in this way, what we’re actually putting in is “the date, at 00:00”. In other words the -gt switch will pick up the entire day of the date entered, but to catch the entire last day of a month with the -lt switch, we must enter the first day of the following month. In this case we’ll dump everything up until 00:00 on October the 1st, which is exactly what we want.
3) In this case I added the IsArchive directive. This tells the command to look in the online archive belonging to the mailbox instead of in the actual mailbox.
Checking job status
We can check if an export request is queued, in progress, completed, or failed, simply by running Get-MailboxExportRequest. But as usual we can get some truly useful information by stringing some commands together. Why did a job fail? Did the supposedly “completed” job parse our command line the way we expected it to?
Get-MailboxExportRequest -status Completed | Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics -IncludeReport | fl > c:\report.txtHere we first ask for a list of Completed jobs – but we might as well ask for failed jobs. Then we dump a pretty verbose list of the report(s) to a regular text file for easy reading.
Clearing jobs
Once we’re confident we know what we need to know about our completed or failed jobs, we can use the Remove-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet to clear our job list. Combine it with Get-MailboxExportRequest to clear many at a time. For example:
Get-MailboxExportRequest -status Completed | Remove-MailboxExportRequestThis will simply remove all jobs with the status Completed.