Often, you’ll want to export a user mailbox from Exchange and store it as a .PST file. In my organisation I do that when people leave the company. We don’t want to keep the mailbox active but it’s handy to have the old mailbox in case we ever need to go dumpster diving to find something from the past.
The easiest way it to use PowerShell to export the mailbox to a UNC file share (local drives don’t seem to be supported).
Click your Start button and type Exchange – select and run the Exchange Management Shell.
When the shell finally loads enter a command similar to this, substituting your own mailbox name and export path and filename.
New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox Paul -FilePath \\myserver\export\paul.pst
Some output will show that the requests is queued. It might take a few minutes to start. You can also make multiple requests and Exchange will export them whenever it feels like it.
You can check the status of the export(s) like this:
Get-MailboxExportRequest
A table will be displayed along with the current Status. Once the export shows as complete it’s probably okay to delete the mailbox from Exchange – but that decision is yours to make 🙂