Any way to extract mail into a pst from exchange 2003?

R

Red Squirrel

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I tried xmege, but because the mailbox is corrupted, it corrupts the pst and basically just fails. I tried using scanpst on the resulting pst and that fails too. I don't see the point of a repair tool if it fails to repair the file due to corruption... that's the whole point of using the tool! Silly Microsoft.

The user CAN get to his email, so it's not corrupt that bad, but all the tools refuse to have anything to do with that mailbox. Is there another way to do this? If the user drags and drops he gets lot of errors as well, but if he does one email at a time it works fine, but that's just insane, there are thousands. I guess I could map the mailbox and do it for the user, but I'm really hoping there's an easier way then doing one email at a time.
 
Your going to have to run eseutil on the whole exchange database to likely fix it, its a pain to run because you have to take the whole exchange server offline to do it and, depending on how big your database is, it can take many hours to run, with no guarantee of success.
 
Ouch... that sucks. They would never let us take it down. We're not even allowed to do windows updates.
 
ashman said:
Your going to have to run eseutil on the whole exchange database to likely fix it, its a pain to run because you have to take the whole exchange server offline to do it and, depending on how big your database is, it can take many hours to run, with no guarantee of success.
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Sadly this was the only way to fix an issue we ran into a little while ago. We have 200+ users and it took a weekend to do. It sounds like a similar issue but the user didn't have any trouble moving multiple items to another mailbox. So we created a local mailbox and moved everything to folder locally before trying the repair. The repair fixed this current users issue as well as a few other corruption issues. Just suggest a weekend maintenance period and see if they will have issues with that. It is kind of silly that whoever "they" is would expect it support but tie your hands in such a way to keep you from doing so. It's life. Things happen. Maybe recommend a replication virtual server for the exchange server?
 
Here's what I ended up doing: The problematic items seemed to be calendar items, they would do some really weird crap when dragged and drop, when there was multiple, it was just a mess. Moving more then 5 emails at a time would result in an error as well.

So I dragged and dropped the entire folder (turned out the user only wanted a specific folder and not the whole mailbox, so this made things easier) to a new PST file. There was so much corruption that the fields got all messed up, like the subjects would not show up, but if you double click the emails you CAN read them. I have low confidence in this pst file, but the user was happy and it looked like all emails DID open.

This was just a workaround though, a dirty one at that.

We also have tons of calendar related issues. Meetings disappearing, free/busy not showing up properly etc.... I am wondering if running that eseutil tool would fix all these issues that we have. I will never be successful in convincing the IT manager to let us do that, mind you, but it's still good to know that tool exists. He has an attitude of "we can't go down, this is a hospital!" but does not realize that lack of preventative maintenance could cause it to go down... for good. I have a feeling our exchange store is a real mess, and I'm actually scared for my job that one day it will corrupt to an irrecoverable state, due to the lack of maintenance. This IT manager will be retiring soon so as long as it holds up till then, and hopefully the next one will be competent and have a belief in preventative maintenance. The joy of IT politics.
 
Long shot.....

Maybe give this a try. It is a long shot but I'm a very firm believer in virtual machines to ease some of the huge aggravations of it work. There would still be some down time though. Well, roughly. You would be missing all emails that pass from the time of the backup to the time of restore. But it maybe possible to script this. Again this is a long shot. Just out of curiosity I'll give the script part a try (pushing all mail to temp local profile while the rebuild on the core database is running).
 
either you have a planned maintenance outage, or you have an unplanned outage... guess which one's worse to have? and if it's that important then shouldn't you be setup for high availability? should look into upgrading to exchange 2010... but that's going to be a big mess if your database files are corrupted...
we lost a couple mailboxes when our exchange 2003 server died, fortunately we were in the process of migrating to 2010, but it was a hectic weekend trying to recover the database files and all the emails with it, then migrated and stand up exchange 2010... during my first 60 days at the job...

just remember to make a back up of the file before you run eseutil... you don't want to screw up the only copy of your emails... if it gets real bad, you can always open up a support ticket with microsoft... $250 for them to fix it is worth the investment... especially if it's a bigger problem that you don't know how to fix...
 
Bookmage said:
if it gets real bad, you can always open up a support ticket with microsoft... $250 for them to fix it is worth the investment... especially if it's a bigger problem that you don't know how to fix...
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Agreed.

Alternatively.... Since you know that your Outlook DB is suspect anyways, I'd suggest paying them to do the upgrade. Doing it right the first time often requires less time and frustration than investigating a break-fix scenario.
 
MS won't support us since we're using VMware and not Hyper-V, so since VMware is their competition, they won't support it. Apparently they do support Exchange 2010 in VMware though.

So I'm wondering, is it actually an option to pay them to do the upgrade? We are thinking of going to 2010 in hopes it fixes all our issues, though I don't see that being approved before 2015. We buy red tape in bulk where I work, it comes on a skid.
 
i dont think MS will do the upgrade for you, they'll refer you to a partner to do the upgrade for you... but MS support will help you fix problems...

I think they would recommend a partner to help you plan out a migration to Exchange 2010 and that partner will help you do the migration. so you would have to get a price quote and figure out how many man hours that would take...

you should have a plan for migration at the least... so when that server somehow breaks, you would have a plan ready and be able to upgrade at a moments notice...
 
Microsoft will support you under VMWare, its just that Exchange wasn't recommended under VMWare until Exchange 2007, what they can do though, it ask you to reinstall everything on a physical server to try and reproduce the problem in a physical environment. If your IT manager does not think you may have corruption in your exchange database then that's fine, I would just be surprised if problems like this have not occurred with other users and their mailboxes. Migrating to Exchange 2010 is not that bad, I've done it, it just takes careful planning and a weekend. I do sincerely hope your IT department is backing up their exchange databases every night though. On another note you should look into running the ISINTEG tool, while it doesn't make any changes it will tell you if your Information Store is corrupt or not.
 
Corruption seems to be the norm on the big mailboxes (2GB+) so yeah we definitly have some issues. We do have backups but if exmerge is not working on these mailboxes I'm afraid the backups may actually be corrupted too. It's a very scary situation. Hopefully we'll get the go ahead soon to upgrade, or at least bring it down to scan/repair the DB.

Does ISINTEG require to take the server down? If not, I might give it a try so I can confirm if there are issues or not.
 
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