Exporting Email to PST using Exchange 2010 SP2+

After an employee leaves the company you may want to backup all their old email account to a PST file after you forward their email to their replacement. Microsoft’s wonderful Ex-Merge utility no longer works with Exchange 2010. You can’t do this using the Exchange Management Console (EMC). You can only do this with Exchange Management Shell (EMS).

Before opening the EMS you’ll need to make sure that the user you are logged in as as the rights to export the mailbox contents. By default no user has this right. See Add the Mailbox Import Export Role to a Role Group for details on how to do this. If you get “New-MailboxExport request is not a valid cmdlet” then you probably haven’t set the permissions correctly.

Once you have given export rights to your logon then run the following command in EMS:

New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox user -FilePath \\ES\UserPST\user.pst

-Mailbox using just the mailbox name usually works or you can use the full email address.

-Filepath will only work with a network share. It will not create directories, only files. If you need to save to a local drive use the hidden share. For  \\ExchangeServer\c$\UserPST

The Exchange server will queue the export. When the export is complete you can delete the mailbox.