Delete E-mails From Users' Mailbox

I see a lot of posts of people asking how to delete certain e-mails from their users’ mailboxes.

It is very simple and it is done using the Export-Mailbox command.

Imagine that we want to delete e-mails from exchange@microsoft.com from any of my folders. In this case we would simply do:

Export-Mailbox nuno@letsexchange.com -SenderKeywords exchange@microsoft.com -DeleteContent

Because you are not using the –TargetMailbox option and we are using –DeleteContent, all the e-mails that match the search criteria won’t be exported to anywhere but actually deleted.

But, of course, we can do searches a lot more complex. For example, let’s delete:
- all e-mails from every folder except the Deleted Items folder
- that were sent from exchange@microsoft.com with the subject “Test E-mail”
- and that are older than one month:


[DateTime] $date1Month = [DateTime]::Now.AddMonths(-1)

Export-Mailbox nuno@letsexchange.com -SenderKeywords exchange@microsoft.com -SubjectKeywords "Test E-mail" -EndDate $date1Month -ExcludeFolders "\Deleted Items" -DeleteContent -Confirm:$False


If you are doing this on a script for a list of users, you can also do something like:

(...)
ForEach (...)
{
 $strDeleted = Export-Mailbox $strMbxToSearch -SenderKeywords exchange@microsoft.com -SubjectKeywords "Test E-mail" -EndDate $date1Month -ExcludeFolders "\Deleted Items" -DeleteContent -Confirm:$False


 $intTotalDel = $strDeleted.StandardMessagesDeleted
 Write-Host "Searched $strMbxToSearch and deleted $intTotalDel"
}

Note that all the deleted e-mails will go to the user’s dumpster, not to the Deleted Items folder.

Single Instance Storage in Exchange 2010

As most of you already probably know Single Instance Storage (SIS) in Exchange 2010 is gone.

Check this excellent post about this subject on the Exchange Team Blog: Dude, Where's My Single Instance?

Note: don’t forget that in Exchange 2007, attachments are single instanced, but message bodies are not.