Search For A Specific Folder

A recent snafu in our deployment of managed folders for email archiving resulted in duplicate folders in a few dozen mailboxes. I didn't know about the duplicate folders at the time it occurred, and none of the affected users reported the "extra" set of folders for over a month.

We use an Exchange managed folder mailbox policy to push a set of managed folders to each mailbox. When created by Exchange this way, the folders can't be modified by the user, which allows Enterprise Vault to apply a consistent archiving and retention policy to the contents of these folders.

If the Enterprise Vault (EV) provisioning process runs before the managed folders are created by Exchange, it causes two problems - (1) the EV-created folders are not managed by Exchange, which means that users can modify or even delete them, (2) and when Exchange tries to create the managed folders, it finds those folder names already exist, so Exchange creates a new set of folders with a slightly different name ("Managed Folders1"). The result is one set of folders targeted for archiving by EV, and another set of folders being managed by Exchange.

If we catch the problem early enough, before the user has moved any messages into either set of folders, then the fix is fairly easy.

1. Open the mailbox in Outlook or OWA, and delete the Managed Folder hierarchy that was created by Enterprise Vault
2. From an EMS prompt, remove the managed folder mailbox policy and folders.
       Set-Mailbox -Identity "mailboxID" -RemoveManagedFolderAndPolicy
3. If the folders are empty, the previous command will delete the entire managed folder hierarchy. Then all we have to do is set the policy again.
       Set-Mailbox -Identity "mailboxID" -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy
4. And then run the assistant to actually push the new set of managed folders to the mailbox.
       Get-Mailbox -Identity "mailboxID" | Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

What does all that have to do with searching for a folder? Well, after fixing the reported mailbox, I was curious about how many others were out there that hadn't been reported. I needed to find every mailbox that had a "Managed Folders1" folder in it. Here's what I came up with.

$mbxs = Get-MailboxDatabase | Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited

$y = @()

foreach ($mb in $mbxs)

{

    $x = Get-MailboxFolderStatistics $mb | where {$_.Name -match "Managed Folders*"} | Select Name

    $x | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "DisplayName" -Value $mb.DisplayName

    $y += $x

}

$y | where {$_ -AND $_.Name -eq "ManagedFolders1"} | sort DisplayName

It took a few minutes to run through our 3000+ mailboxes, but in the end, I discovered another 72 mailboxes that had Managed Folders that had been deployed incorrectly. Now, the time-consuming task of fixing them, as detailed above, begins. Bummer.