Start Managed Folder Assistant for a single mailbox

by Bharat Suneja

When testing Managed Folder Mailbox Policy settings in Exchange Server 2007, you may need to frequently run the Managed Folder Assistant (MFA)) to process a mailbox on-demand, so you can check the mailbox content and MRM logs. However, every time you run Start-ManagedFolderAssistant, the MFA processes all mailboxes on all Mailbox Databases on the server.

Of course, you can avoid all the agony by instructing the Managed Folder Assistant to process only the specified mailbox:

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Mailbox “Foo”

Processing a single mailbox results in the MFA completing its job quickly and makes parsing the MRM log easier— the MFA only logs events related to the specified mailbox.

The -Mailbox parameter does not take multiple mailboxes as input. To process more than 1 mailbox, you will need to use the Get-Mailbox cmdlet (or Get-User piped to Get-Mailbox, depending on the property you want to filter on) and pipe a filtered list of mailboxes to Start-ManagedFolderAssistant. For example, the following command will result in the MFA processing all mailboxes from the department:

Get-User -Filter {department -eq “Sales” -and RecipientType -eq “UserMailbox”} | Get-Mailbox | Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

Or maybe you want to have the MFA process all mailboxes with a particular policy applied. Note, the Filter requires the distinguishedName of the policy:

$policy = (Get-ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy “MRMPolicy-VPs”).distinguishedName; Get-Mailbox -Filter {ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy -eq $policy} | Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

merwindz March 26, 2010 at 6:16 am

I have implemented managed folder policy on deleted items folder witgin Exchange 2007 SP1( RU9), which is working as expected. However, if a user delete / move any folder directly under deleted items and has got any items in it, exchange will not purge those items. Exchange is purging only the items which are placed directly under deleted items folder. Any thoughts please?

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merwindz April 8, 2010 at 12:32 am

Any update on this?

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Johno November 30, 2022 at 7:44 am

Nope :(

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