Archive old email from exchange?

[JamesC]

Does anyone have any methods of archiving old email from exchange? Id rather not get users to do it manually through outlook and then try and save it to a server - possibly to fiddly for them. I also don't fancy installing outlook on the server and setting permissions to do it manually myself. There must be a better way of archiving old email!

[srochford]

exmerge (MS tool; free on their web site - make sure you get the current version) can be used to extract messages from any or all mailboxes based on given criteria - including age. It then writes them to PSTs (1 per mailbox) which you can archive in any way you choose. For example, you could run it on the 1st of each month to archive stuff from (say) 36 months ago and build up a set of folders for 2005-06, 2006-07, 2005-08 etc

Have a good play first - it can be destructive - but it's incredibly powerful.

You'll need to run it as an account which has rights to all user mailboxes (don't think domain admins have that right by default)

[leco]

Originally Posted by srochford

exmerge (MS tool; free on their web site - make sure you get the current version) can be used to extract messages from any or all mailboxes based on given criteria - including age. It then writes them to PSTs (1 per mailbox) which you can archive in any way you choose. For example, you could run it on the 1st of each month to archive stuff from (say) 36 months ago and build up a set of folders for 2005-06, 2006-07, 2005-08 etc

Have a good play first - it can be destructive - but it's incredibly powerful.

You'll need to run it as an account which has rights to all user mailboxes (don't think domain admins have that right by default)

Thanks for this, I have been wondering for ages how it could be done.

[JamesC]

Thanks srochford. I'll have a quick play. I'm probably gonna script a scheduled task on the exchange server to export email and archive it for users. Best way to do it I think.

[FN-Greatermanchester]

We have setup journaling, it will make a copy of every incoming and outgoing message in a special mail box. Every day we drag those messages into a folder with the date of that day. At the end of the moth we archive them all and put them onto another server. Works fine plus you don’t need any add-ons