Start Managed Folder Assistant for a single mailbox

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

Tags
Administration   Compliance   Exchange 2007   Mailbox   PowerShell