Hi,

I am currently siting with 2 very large mailboxes in my Exchange 2010 environment, both are 100GB each due to the business not cleaning them up. these are small item without attachments but there are many 33 Million in the one mailbox.

I have been tasked to remove all items older than 3 months but the trouble is nothing seems to be working. I have tried the following

Create Exchange 2010 retention policy which does not seem to run.

I have tried to hard delete the items from the Mailbox from PS but the task just times out.

I cannot open the mailboxes through Outlook or OWA - times out

Tried to move the mailboxes to there own DB but the move also just fails.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Regards

Jason

Hi Jason ,

Once i ran into this kind of scenario and did the following

I was having a passive copy of the DB where the user mailbox resided 

suspended the passive copy for a while 

Copied the Passive copy DB 

Used SysTools Exchange EDB Recovery Software which saved my life 

here  is the review of it which made me to write after i got impressed with its functionality

http://exchangequery.com/2014/04/20/systools-exchange-edb-recovery-software/

Good Luck !!

Hi Jason,

Have you tried using search-mailbox, this should delete the specified contents from respective mailbox

Get-Mailbox -identity <Mailbox> | Search-Mailbox -TargetMailbox SearchMailbox -TargetFolder Search Results -search-mailbox -searchquery {sent:01/01/1980..01/01/2010} -DeleteContent

Regards,

Bala

It might be easier to do the following:

1. Export the date range of email you wish to retain to PST file
2. Disable the mailbox thereby disassociating it from the AD account
3. Create a new mailbox for the AD account
4. Import the PST with the desired mail in to the new mailbox

Hi,

Please run the Start-ManagedFolderAssistant command after you apply the retention policy to check result.

Besides, you can also use the Search-Mailbox -DeleteContent command to remove messages older than 3 months to check result.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298173(v=exchg.141).aspx

Best regards,

Agreed with peter suggestion that could be an easier approach to manage this task.

However, I have managed this task using a software (http://www.exchangemailboxtopst.org/) that made my job more comfortable and have successfully completed without any problem.

Hi all,

Thanks for all the suggestions unfortunately I have done the search-mailbox option to delete the content but this times out which I suspect is due to the amount of emails in the mailbox.

I also did initially run the start-managedfolderAssistant which completes but no items are removed from the mailbox.

I am not sure if it is even worth opening a ticket with MS as they will probably just say that there are too many items in the mailbox.

It may come down to disabling the mailbox and re-creating a fresh one with Retention policies from the start.

Regards

Jason

Hi ,

Alright ,Please check the below mentioned script.

del C:\Scripts\nithya\dontdelete\*.*
$a=(Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString('MM-dd-yyyy')
Search-Mailbox -Identity "nithya@abc.com" -SearchQuery "Received<$a" -DeleteContent -force >>  "C:\Scripts\nithya\dontdelete\Log $(get-date -f dd-MM-yyyy).csv"
Send-MailMessage -To "ramya@abc.com" -From "nithyamail@abc.com" -Subject "nithya Mails Delete Log $(get-date -f dd-MM-yyyy)" -Smtpserver "192.168.1.10" -Attachments "C:\Scripts\nithya\dontdelete\Log $(get-date -f dd-MM-yyyy).csv"

Based on my knowledge search-mailbox is limited up to 10000 searches but on your side you are having large no of emails .On the above script you can adjust the days,mailbox name,email address and smtp server as per your requirement .Due to the search limit you need to schedule the script on the task scheduler to run it for multiple times in a day to achieve your goal.

Note : Please try it for a test mailbox before going for a production use .In my environment it is working good.