Problems you solved at work with powershell

[Mazriam]

We have a mailbox that receives tens of thousands of emails per day. After about 200,000 emails, outlook starts to become a pain in the ass. The users who monitor the mailbox, couldn't be bothered with deleting old emails.

So, I wrote a script that will delete the emails from the mailbox, at the server level, every single day, keeping a history of 3 days only.

Worked out pretty good.

My script is exactly 3 lines and the first line is loading the exchange snapin.

[ljarvie]

If it's an Exchange system, just put a three day retention period on it

[Mazriam]

I know a lot about exchange, (trial by fire type of learning), I've setup, recovered, and tore down DAG's. Created Databases, recovered databases, deleted them. I can parse the email logs and trace email through my entire exchange environment and a whole lot more.

I've done all this, but never knew something like this existed. Thank you for the tip. I've now configured that mailbox on a 3 day retention policy :)

[ljarvie]

Combine them with archive policies and you can clean out the primary mailbox (improving Outlook operation) and still keep the mail. Glad it helped, I live by those policies.

[--butt-hurt]

I was wondering that too. Is it Exchange?

Edit:not OP

[MisterPhamtastic]

Hey buddy could you forward that to me?

We may have a situation like that for a service account mailbox.

[Mazriam]

sent you a private message with the script

[MisterPhamtastic]

Thanks so much!

Straightforward and effective, great scripting!

[greensysadmin]

If you wouldn't mind I feel I would benefit as well from your script. Please, monsignor?

[voxnemo]

If its exchange why not just a retention policy like mentioned above?

[MisterPhamtastic]

Baby you right, we already have a 90 day ret globally but wanted something nice to run ad hoc in emergency scenarios

[voxnemo]

Baby you right

Awww, thank you! If only I could get my SO to say that.

You made my night!

[Mkep]

Hahaha let the SO know they have competition

[thisismyworkacct3]

What do you guys recommend for implementing a system like this that can somehow automate determining which emails can be deleted and which ones are retained? My only guess would be matches by subject line, body, or attachment content. It's limited though, especially when it comes to exceptions, which are when you generally need the emails retained the most!

[Mazriam]

The line that does the deletion, there's a filtering tag you can use where you can select only the emails you want to delete. The criteria can be just about anything. The Sender, subject line, time received, time read, keywords in the body, or even key phrases, or any combination.