Managed Folder Policies
Exchange 2007 Managed Folder Policies
In previous verions of Exchange a number of mailbox management settings where handled by the RUS (recpient update service). Exchange 2007 has changed the way the users mailboxes are managed and Microsoft has taken more time to work Email Life Cycle (ELC) into Exchange 2007.
In this article I am going to deploy some deafult folder management (inbox,deleted items, etc) and add some new custom folder management policies for my users.
As with most featues with Exchange 2007 this can be deployed via EMS (command line) or EMC (gui). I will attempt to move back and forth between these methods to show thier capabilites.
Deafult folder management
Lets launch EMC—> Organizational config –>Mailbox
Here we can see a number of tabs and I am going to focu on the deafult folder management tab. Afte selecting the tab we can see default Outlook folders items such as inbox, deleted items, etc…
Lets create a policy for one of my favorite areas to manage, deleted items. Over the years I have found that users use thier deleted items folder as almost an archive for thier mailbox, I never understood this but hey
Let create a new managed content settings for deleted items.
1. Select Deleted Items
2.right click the screen and select new managed content settings
There are a number of options to set on the first page,
– Message Type , Retension period date,action, and lenght of retension
Message Type allows us to define what type of content we want this policy to apply to, since we are dealing with deleted items I want to set to All Mailbox Content.
The Action lets of define what we want to do and for this policy I want to delete and allow recovery
Retention period start tells the policy what is should base its information on, either date the item was moved to a folder or the date the item was received/created
Here we can see the first page completed
The next page allows us to journal a copy of the content to a specified location
The next page provides us with the settings that we have choosen
The completion page show the powershell command used to create the new management settings
At this point all we have done is create the management settings, by its self this does nothing but create a template for us to use in a policy.
Managed Folder Policy
The policy will use the new created management settings that we have created.
1. Select the Managed Folder Policy tab
2. Right click the screen and select New Managed Folder Mailbox Policy
The first page of wizard allows us to specify a name for the policy and then add a component to manage.
After selecting the Add button we see a list of items that we can manage. Note not all of them have managed content setting created at this time but the policy will allow you to add the anyway.
After selecting deleted items we are brought back to the origianl screen –> New
The completion page show the powershell commands used to create the policy –> finish
Now that we have 1. created managed content settings and 2. created a managed folder mailbox policy we have 2 more steps before our policy becomes functional.
By deafult the mailbox management assist is set to never run, we need to enable this and set a schedule for the process to run and enforce our policy.
From EMC — Server –Mailbox right click on the mailbox server and select properties
Select the Messaging Records Management tab and you will see the default of never run
Select Customize and choose the appropriate hours for the process to run
After we have created a schedule for the mailbox assistant to run the last remainng step is to associate the policy with user mailbox.
For large amounts of users utilizing powershell would be the preferred way to deploy this, however since I am going to set this for 1 user I am going to use EMC.
In EMC select Recpient Configuraiton –> Mailbox
double click the mailbox and select Mailbox Settings
Select Messaging Records Management then click properties
check the Managed Folder Mailbox Policy and browse to the correct policy for the user
We have now completed the last step and our policy will take affect the next time the mailbox assistant runs.
We can use powershell to force an update if we want to apply the policy immediately.
Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -identity mailboxservername






March 6th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Hey, thanks for this Howto!
I´m using it to keep only 30 days of spam in our quarantine-mailbox.
We had the problem of not watching after this mailbox for a couple of months, resulting in a mailbox with hundreds of thousands small mails.
Deleting by hand was not easy, believe it!
So this was the solution!
Kind regards,
Jens
May 17th, 2008 at 6:50 am
Yeah, thanks for this.
November 4th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Thats a great hotwo thanks, but what if you created a second Managed Content Settings on Deleted Items and wanted this to apply to a specific user. How would you tell the policy to use the second Managed Content Settings and not the first.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:32 am
policies are applied at the user level, so if you want 2 different polices you create pol1 and pol2 then you assign the appropriate one to each user
November 19th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
I have hundreds of users. What is the powershell command to apply the policy to all users, or a group of users?
November 20th, 2008 at 9:53 am
you can use the get-user or get-mailbox , by adding a switch for the -OrganizationalUnit or get-distrobutiongroupmember and pipe that to the Set-Mailbox -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy
so it would look like this
get-distrobutiongroupmember group1 | Set-Mailbox -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy policy1
December 10th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Use this Shell command to apply a policy to all of your existing users. I have not figured out how to get a policy to apply to all future created account. So I’ll just have to run this periodically to catch new mailboxes.
Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Set-Mailbox -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy “Purge Deleted Items”
Substitute between the quotes for your own policy name.
December 10th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
you apply the policy at mbx creation time or you can add it later.
Look into template mailboxes
January 20th, 2009 at 10:18 am
policies are applied at the user level, so if you want 2 different polices you create pol1 and pol2 then you assign the appropriate one to each user
Then pol 1 and pol 2 will both be pointing to the same folders how will exchange know with content setting to apply? if you have two different content setting under (inbox) ?
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:24 am
Tony lets move this to the forum
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:47 am
I have moved 50 users to exchange 2007 newley i want these paticlur users need to apply managed folder policy..
is there any command for particluer users can taken one by one from text file and can apply purge policy.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:39 am
I Have implemented Managed Folder with policy of retention and set it to some users, I have observed that managed folders of users calculated and takes from the total size of user mail box, isn’t this conflicts with concept of managed folder which should has its own size and quota without user mail box size.
Any clarification
April 29th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Excellent write up – thanks for taking the time to document all the steps – I finally know how to implement this, thanks
April 30th, 2009 at 8:07 am
glad I can help
May 12th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Can you force newly-created mailboxes to inherit a managed folder policy or do you have to manually select the policy during the creation stage?
July 16th, 2009 at 6:07 am
Thanks for an excellent article. A quick question.
We have a high success rate directing our local and international customers to this article, when they need information about how to trim their Exchanger Server to manageable size. Would it be alright with you, if we setup a link in our online documentation to your article?
July 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
I have a custom folder called IMPORTANT and have a policy stating that the retention time is 10 years (3650 days).
I have another policy stating mail over 3 years old is to go to deleted items,
Will the first policy keep the important folder data? How does the priority of the policies work?
Thanks, love the write-up
July 18th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
sure, no problem
July 18th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
MRM is done by folders in Ex 2007 but this is changin in Exchange 2010…. How do you have the delete setup and the 3 year move to delete items?
August 13th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Hello,
Should this work with Outlook XP/2003 clients running on Exchange 2007? We’ve tried this method a couple of times but the policy never seems to take effect.
Many thanks
Aly
September 18th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Hi,
I have asked msexchange and microsoft and no answers so I am trying you.
I have setup a managed folder along with journalling, we are moving emails older than 90 days into a managed folder and then permanently deleting them. It runs on around 400 mailboxes and works but for some reason it wont do 18 of them. I get this message in the EV.
Service MSExchangeMailboxAssistants. Managed Folder Mailbox Assistant
skipped 18 mailboxes on database First Storage Group/Mailbox Database
(77ca6934-10bd-46bd-8dce-f09e7d05cbbb). Mailboxes:
Packer Darren(b8f52dbf-1dde-441c-911a-3c07d6967865)
Turvey Ben(23afeec6-fcdb-4a11-877a-dc298824a18b)
Noake Rachel(772d1dcd-0808-4cf0-8d7e-e1f78d77035e)
Turner Michael(917ceecc-b660-4239-b547-d8ce412dcf73)
Lowson Rebecca(361d7ad3-e6ee-48a2-a9f7-729d2f855a4d)
Taylor Richard(110c76fd-1c31-4f6b-bc2c-29f046a8adce)
Wellington Lorna(e93d3410-5311-47f8-a712-4cb9892e13ba)
Rennie Tom(a0f7e210-ac9a-4101-a231-4933fb2bee2d)
Botonjic Amir(19f46914-8b9a-4f2b-9e92-a82dcc7aa306)
Wright Jan(f61f5629-7f90-4af7-9377-6ac94a7cabe7)
Perrins Sandy(01fe7c2e-9fa8-4636-aa03-f35590b28c7b)
Smith Sheila(7105a135-0e50-4bdc-afbd-66645e91cbfe)
HRTrainer Account(eda75d3e-f1e6-4d4c-b68b-81eed40f7c85)
Morais Jennifer(ba01534e-b8b4-42f9-b633-44b9fdc4a6cc)
Barrow Christine(e37cb457-e9d0-432d-ad4b-33be528ff22c)
Mehdi Ruhina(e3b22b62-0836-459d-a2be-c56b3a5ac68a)
Eadie Anna(bcf6ab68-7316-46c0-a12c-4d43621ce369)
Auchterlonie Carole(8dc0267b-e008-480c-a0fa-7a80864cb3be)
I have tried deleteing the mailbox and creating a new one, the process works
on the mailbox until I import the users emails in and then it stops again.
Any ideas are appreciated.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Also sounds like there is some corruption in that data you import that is causing the process to break. Is there any data in common between the mailboxes?
December 7th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
I have have the Skipped mailbox problem occur, when a managed folder already exists in the mailbox, try removing any folders under “Managed Folders\” then running the Managed Folder Assistant against the mailbox.
Carver
January 15th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Great post Genie thank you. I got this all setup, just having issues with the cmdlet to apply to all my existing users. You state the command should be this:
get-distrobutiongroupmember group1 | Set-Mailbox -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy policy1
I have substituted my distribution list for the text “group1″ and substituted my policy name for the text “policy1″.
The command does not take though. something else is amuk. Is there anything else i need to change from the sample you provided?
thanks in advance.