I’m preparing for a project that involves upgrading an existing Microsoft Exchange 2003 infrastructure to Exchange 2013.

There are about 50 mailboxes all varying in size. 70% of the mailboxes are less than 2GB. 15% of the mailboxes are 10GB or more, with that biggest being 30GB. The rest fall somewhere between 2-10GB.

ExMerge supports exporting of mailboxes up to 2GB in size. This will work for about 70% of the infrastructure.

The remaining mailbox exports will require some workarounds.

Microsoft states the following for working around this issue:

Microsoft KB916085

  • Request that the mailbox owner delete all e-mail messages that are not required. Alternatively, request that the mailbox owner create a .pst file on the local computer and then move all messages that are not required to that local .pst file. This is to bring the mailbox size to less than 2 GB before you run ExMerge against the mailbox. Note Because the Exchange Server single instance storage benefits are lost when you convert the mailbox to a .pst file by using ExMerge, the mailbox must be less than 2 GB.
  • Export the mailbox to a .pst file by using Outlook 2003 instead of by using the ExMerge tool.
  • Use ExMerge to export individual folders or groups of folders from the mailbox into individual smaller .pst files instead of exporting the whole mailbox to a single large .pst file.

Mailboxes Larger than 2GB

To address these mailboxes, my plans are to use bullet point 3 from the above Microsoft KB article workaround notes.

If this was a mixed environment, meaning if I had Exchange 2003 and 2007 or 2010 in the infrastructure, I could use the PowerShell cmdlet to export the mailboxes. Darn.

Once these are exported, I plan to use PowerShell to import the mailboxes into Exchange 2013 using the New-MailboxImportRequest cmdlet provided in PowerShell.

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