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Microsoft exchange corrupt emails

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by john.s.taylor

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I have just taken over a Exchange 5.5 site which has never been backed up! The information store database has been corrupted but I managed to fix this using the exchange rebuild utils and all seemed to be well. However a number of users now have emails they cannot read or delete and of course I cannot delete and recreate their mail boxes until this is fixed. Neither can I really start using my new tape drive and backup software to this is done!
Has anyone any ideas how I can delete corrupt emails?

5 replies

by mjones

I have run into this problem 3 times over the last year of running Exchange 5.5. This last time i was caught without having a viable offline backup of the database less than 30 days old. I have found the best way to regain database integrity withtout having those unopenable emails is to load from a previous offline backup. The recovery utilities dont always save data, they mostly just stop the corruption in the database, leaving 'orphaned' emails like the ones you've run into. I have recoverd from this by exporting all of the users information that i can into a pst, then deleting the mailbox. I would then create a new mail box and import the mail from the pst into the exchange database. This left me with no corruption and all the email was readable. Unfortunately the email that was unreadeable is lost. I dont know of anyother way to recover from this.

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