Deleting a million emails from an Exchange mailbox

HungryHippos

HungryHippos

HungryHippos

Soldato
Joined
25 Mar 2004
Posts
15,990
Location
Fareham
Learnt something new today, if you ever need to delete a million emails from an Exchange mailbox, then I highly recommend using MfcMapi to do it. Find the folder, right click and choose the option to delete items with hard deletion.

Outlook conks out with that many items in the inbox, and deleting via Export-Mailbox with -DeleteContent:$True only deletes them when it finishes processing everything, and for me this would have taken days to complete.

MfcMapi appeared to conk out as well but checking with Get-MailboxStatistics -Identity "Mailbox" periodically showed the item count was dropping quite fast.

Might be useful info for other pepole who get into a situation like this.
 
Interesting! Been a loooong time since I made proper use of mfcmapi and now none of my clients have anywhere near that amount of mail. Useful to know none the less, thanks for sharing :D
 
I really could have used MFCMAPI a couple of weeks ago.

A customer let a couple of unattended mailboxes get rather large - 10GB and 8GB. They could only spare an old PC for emptying them out. I think the 10GB mailbox took a week to empty...
 
Sucks! :(

btw you *Chris* from OMD by any chance? long shot but name looks similar :P

If you don't know what i'm talking about then I can assume that it's not you hehe.

@BoomAM - You can use it to empty any mailboxes you wish, but you need to set them all up as Outlook profiles first before you can even run MfcMapi against them.

I would only use MfcMapi when the item counts get stupid, we have an exchange 07 server for PST exports and for multiple users running Export-Mailbox with -DeleteContent set to $True is going to be much quicker/less administrative.

The mailbox in question I had to empty was a postmaster address which had tons of emails daily arriving in it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom