Dealing with Disabled Users' Email Archiving

Disclaimer: This post is just my opinion on how to handle archiving. It's not the be-all end-all, but it does work very well.

A lot of organizations have different methods of data retention, especially when it comes to email. One place I worked at went as far as setting up a child domain (complete with an Exchange 2003 environment) solely for housing Disabled Users. After the users had been migrated to the child domain (using ADMT no less), their mailbox would be moved over and stored there for several months as an archival "solution." This place has thousands of users and a ton of disabled ones at that, needless to say the child domain got out of hand!

What I prefer to do, which is much simpler and saves money both in storage and user CALs, is to set up a network share, grant managers/supervisors access to the share (in order to access their subordinates PSTs), use the Import/Export Mailbox command in Exchange 2010 PowerShell and house the PSTs in an orderly manner in the share. If there's ever a need to reinstate the employee, you can create a mailbox for them and just import the PST into it.

**Note** You must export mailboxes to a network share, PowerShell will throw an error if you try to export it to a local drive. Also, you can use Outlook to export/import a PST, the reasons I use PowerShell are; PS is way faster and you have to install Outlook 64-bit on the Mailbox Server itself to export PSTs.

Archiving Disabled Users' Mailboxes

Lets say John Blogger (username jblogger) was leaving the company and you needed to archive his email because his manager and team needs to complete an important project he was working on.

First, create the network share (we'll call it \\FS1\Shares\PSTs) and grant access to whomever will need to mount the PSTs in their own mailboxes.

We'll need to give you the RBAC permissions for exporting a mailbox. This isn't inherent; only users assigned the Mailbox Import Export Role can perform exports.

Fire up PowerShell on an Exchange server and run:

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role “Mailbox Import Export” -User UserAlias

**Note** Change UserAlias to you

Then, to export John Blogger's mailbox to the network share, run:

New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox "username" -FilePath "\\server\file share location\filename.pst"

**Note** Change "username" to jblogger and "\\server\file share location\filename.pst" to "FS1\Shares\PSTs\jblogger.pst"

To view the progress of the export, run:

Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics -Identity user\MailboxExport

**Note** Change user to jblogger

Now that his PST is stored on the share you can kill his account/mailbox.

If John Blogger were to get rehired, you just need to import his PST after setting up his new mailbox:

New-MailboxImportRequest -FilePath \\server\file share location\filename.pst -Mailbox "username"

**Note** Change \\server\file share location\filename.pst  to "FS1\Shares\PSTs\jblogger.pst" and "username" to jblogger

To view the progress of the import, run:

Get-MailboxImportRequest | Get-MailboxImportRequestStatistics

**Note** Mailbox imports will remain in the Statistics Report until you remove them, by running:

Get-MailboxImportRequest | where {$_.status -eq "Completed"}

Feel free to try out my method of email/PST archiving and leave a comment if you improve upon it. I know it's worked well for me at a few different places ranging from thousands of users to a few hundred :)