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Little intro

I’ve got a case where the customer wanted to delete all of his users’ data in their mailboxes on the Exchange Server, that they got before 1-JAN-2018. He has an incident happened with some leaked critical email messages and he wanted to prevent it by taking this action!

The way to do this of course is pure PowerShell. So I first had to analyze the requirements then build an image in my brain for how the work is going to happen, then test it. And finally implement the needed changes.

Basically what I came to put together is, first I need to backup the data that I will delete. Then I need to delete the data.

To backup the data I need to export the mailboxes to a PST file. And the delete the data I have to use the Search-Mailbox cmdlet with -SearchQuery property.

That was the … Read the rest “How to search and delete users email messages in their mailboxes before a specific date/time – Exchange 2010”

Exchange Server logo

Intro

This is just the back story for this incident and the Exchange Server environment setup. Skip to The issue section for the actual stuff

I recently had a project started to migrate an Exchange Server 2010 organisation to G Suite. The customer had 4 (very old) servers, 2 DAG and 2 CAS. While we were preparing for the data migration phase we hit a very hard brick wall. 3 hard disks on one of the servers decided it was time for them to smoke. Luckily they had 6 disks on that server, and they were using RAID5. Few days after replacing these drives, another different drive on the same server followed its fallen brothers!

So they managed to keep their servers up and were quick to replace the damaged disks at the end. However this was not the case for the databases on the server. Once of the databases … Read the rest “What to do when New-MailboxExportRequest stuck on “Queued” status”