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How to empty out Exch accts?

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by esrfalco 1 view

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We have a dozen Exchange accounts we use in our training room for Outlook training. As you may imagine, the Inboxes and Calendars fill up with distracting data from previous sessions.

Without deleting and recreating the accounts, is there any quick way to delete ALL the data (messages, appointments, notes, etc.) from the account?

5 replies

by glm

What version of Exchange are you using? If you have Exchange 5.5 with Service Pack 3, you could use the Mailbox Manager. It's included with SP3 and installs as an add-in. You can specify the accounts you want to clean, what you want cleaned, the ageof the items to be removed and setup a schedule to do it for you.

If you are not running SP3, you can select the mailboxes from the recipient container and use Clean Mailbox from the Tools menu bar. You can specify the types of items to delete, the age, delete immediately, etc. You can do more than one mailbox at a time but you don't get the granularity or scheduling capabilities you get with the mailbox manager.

Hope that helps.

by esrfalco

Sadly, I'm on the training side, and the network folks aren't particularly cooperative on this issue. I was hoping for a quick way to nuke all the data from the client side.

by glm

Thinking out loud here... sort of. I wonder if you could use personal folders on the local machines instead of server-based storage. Before each training, change the personal folder settings for each mailbox, specifying a new .pst. You could then delete the other .pst files that were used previously. Not a completely brainless task but should beat finding all appointments, tasks, contacts, messages, etc.

Good luck.

by esrfalco

Clever. Thanks for the insight. I have a habit of asking questions with parameters that can't be met.

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