Exchange Migrations & Inbox Duplication
- Trystan
- Apr 26, 2018
- 3 min read
So you have started an Exchange migration project (either to/from Office 365 or between Exchange On Premise versions) …
But you have Inbox Duplication for your users?
It’s not exactly common but annoying when it happens.
You may have exported your user mailboxes fine but when they were imported there now appears a duplicate Inbox, Calendar & Contacts folder in the Mailbox structure and you have done it for all users.
So what can be done...?
Well there are 3 options really:-
1. Logon to each user mailbox and manually tidy up the folders.
2. Ask the Users to manually move items
Or
3. Script it with PowerShell to Move the mail items.
Scripting can be cumbersome to a novice but it is nothing to fear.
We recently had a customer call us with this issue after they started their own Exchange migration project and hit this problem and after a bit of searching we came across an article of someone else who had designed a PowerShell script to do exactly what was required.
So we’ve found the script but that’s the first part so what do we need to consider?
So to run this from your client machine you will need a copy of the EWS Managed API installable from Microsoft (keeping note of what path it was installed to) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42951
You'll need the path to your EWS Service be that On Premise or Office 365
You'll need an account with application impersonation permissions to Exchange.
You'll need to determine what the folders you want to merge are?
In their example the folder is in the root but if your folder is a sub-folder in the structure this can be added, lastly if you are merging a folder that has sub-folders that also need to be moved you would need to make sure that the -ProcessSubFolders parameter is defined in your script.
Once all the above have been installed / gathered it can then be scripted up and tested against one mailbox and after your successful test then set this going against a list of your affected mailboxes.
So things to note after you have merged your folders are:-
Where it can delete folders after the move if the folder is a sub-directory it will not delete the any of that higher up directory structure.
Once migrated you can either ask your users to check and then delete as there is always the possibility users created folders outside the main Inbox or you can set up another script to purge the un-required folders.
Which has already been thought of by the same person whom created the first script and is available here:-
The script may not work for all users mailboxes especially where folder structure isn’t the same hopefully these are only a handful but manual intervention of those mailboxes may always be required.
Lastly you can merge Calendar items but if there are recurring calendar entries that are merged into the these can no longer be managed by the creating user, they would need to be re-created and re-sent to attendees and the previous recurring entry would need to be deleted and any attendee on there would also need to remove the previous recurring entry.
Still having trouble or want some help to fix this issue? Well we can help contact us now to discuss where we can help!