Greetings,

No EmailXtender does not retain where an email would have existed in end users mailbox. There are few reasons for it:

1. Most of the emails are archived from journaling mailboxes.

2. Its logically a lot more resource consuming and there is no logical way to track where a user have email today and where it would be in years to come. If EX would have even tried to keep this info your DataBase would have been quite large. Assume an email went to everyone in a company like EMC that has about 50000 users. Now for this email there would have been 50000 records to keep under monitoring.

In short, no EX does not maintain information about where user would have kept the emails.

Regards,

Rajan

Thanks for the Reply Rajan. Maintaining all those email-folder pointers, resources required for it and large size that databases may have because of all that makes perfect sense, why we don't have it.

So far end users goes, they would really like to have a PST with same folder structures and archived emails in it. With all emails in a flat folder structure 'Inbox' is just too much of work for them, you know, like sort those emails again etc.

Now,

If from EX Search --> I search emails for multiple mailboxes (with separate message by owner option still ON) and once search is ready ---> right click --> Restore Selected Message(s) to Folder ---> would that still restore those emails to Primary Inbox? And not the folders from where those were archived? I guess it's still the same above logic and restore option would restore it just to Primary Mailbox, but just double checking.

Other Long way would be - during search --> under Folders Tab ---> select one folder at a time ---> so when PST is ready, you know which folder that PST corresponds to. But it's just too much of work.

Also,

Is there a way to stop archiving new emails for the time being?

Thanks again!

Does the email you are looking to export only exist in EmailXtender or does it still exist in Exchange?

Emails are on Exchange and after X days those are moved to EX. I am not sure about interval and journal settings though.

Thanks!

They are Archived at some point either by Journaling or a scheduled recurring Historic Archive task, that creates a copy of the message in EmailXtender.

They are probably shortcutted at some point with either just the attachments or also the message bodies replaced with a stub.

Then they are probably deleted from Exchange at some scheduled point in time.

The reason I asked is that if you are at the point where are shortcutted and not deleted you could always restore the shortcuts to Exchange and then create the PST from Exchange. At this point the messages exist in both locations.

If you are at the point where they are deleted from Exchange then you would have to do the export from EmailXtender to PST and you would lose the folder structure.

Thanks Gary. Your explanation helps to know till what point emails will be at both the places. I think emails are deleted from Exchange at some point. If I take a look at volumes in EX, end date on some volume goes even beyond 2008. And if I check mailbox size on Exchange, it's pretty healthy. I mean if we compare time to email ratio, such a mailbox on Exchange would definitely grown up in size but seems like EX is deleting emails from Exchange DB. I will check more on what are current policies on EX. Is there a easy way to find when emails were deleted from Exchange Database, may be by taking a look at EX logs/volumes etc? I can see volumes under EX vault with older end dates, that have right-click options grayed out. While some volumes with recent end dates shows status as "open".

If I get to know, how to find when an email was deleted by EX for certain folders from Exchange Database, that will help me to take a call if I am going with restoring emails to mailbox option or with PST export

Thanks again and appreciate your help

Hi Vik,

I would like to highlight working of SourceOne and EmailXtender with exchange to see if that helps you with your queries:

1. For journaling mailboxes, both products pulls emails from journal mailboxes and then hard delete call is passed to exchange to delete processed messages.

2. Both products can archive emails from exchange using archive jobs/activities. Neither SourceOne nor EX deletes messages after archiving.

3. Customer can choose to shortcut emails to convert full emails to stubs using both products. This helps to bring user mailbox size down without deleting emails.

4. Admin can configure jobs on Ex/ES1 to delete emails in users mailboxes by configuring a criteria of older than certain amount of days. Unless these jobs are not configured to run SourceOne or EX do not delete emails from users mailboxes.

5. Exchange Admins may have some jobs configured on Exchange with help of certain tolls that could be deleting emails from user mailboxes (common practice).

If you think EX was deleting the emails you should launch EmailXtract For Exchange application and that should show you all the jobs configured. See if you have any jobs configured to delete emails. If not then EX didn’t delete it. It has data because that was archived by Journaling or EmailXtract Archive/Shortcut jobs. You can also check if EmailXtract jobs were configured with detail logging, that provided message level granularity of when jobs are run. These logs are saved in EmailXtract folder on EX server where EmailXtender is installed e.g. E:\EmailXtender\EmailXtract

EX and SourceOne are not replacement of the backup products but an archiving software for compliance purposes. It does have features that helps with maintaining database sizes on exchange/domino/sharepoint/file system and many use them as backup software but they need to remember EX and SourceOne does not maintain folder structure (unless it is SourceOne for Files/Sharepoint) and not for emails. Emails returned back will be emails in one folder of PST or one folder of mailbox.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Rajan

They can be restored by using the Search function and writing them back to a mailbox but the information about where they were originally stored is not maintained.

You would have to choose the mailbox folder to write them all to.

Thanks Rajan, really appreciate the work-flow that you explained above.

I was able to launch EmailXtract for Exchange --> clicked on Scheduled Tasks --> and it shows me list of the tasks. Most of these tasks are type 'shortcut' while there are few with type 'archive'. Now what I understand is anything that of type shortcut, I should be able to restore emails back to the original mailboxes in their respective folders.

I want to know about archive tasks though, when we archive messages, those will be archived in Xtender database. Is there a way to restore those emails back to the original mailboxes, into their respective folders?

If you could please help me out on the process to restore emails for shortcut tasks and archive tasks, that would be great.

Thanks again!

Oh yes! Search function, how could I miss that! Thanks Gary

and "writing them back to a mailbox but the information about where they were originally stored is not maintained" - is this true even for shortcuts? I guess is it true for sure for the messages handled by archive tasks?