As an Exchange administrator we have probably all had that panic call from an administrative assistant want to recall a message that was inadvertently sent to the wrong group.  Every end-user knows that Outlooks “Re-Call” capability stinks.  Microsoft’s Exchange Mailbox Merge tool can be used to perform this function (Available as a download from Microsoft Here).  You’ve probably used this tool before to extract a single user’s mailbox from the Exchange Recovery Storage group to a PST.

We can use a similar technique to extract and delete all of the messages that match a criteria like “SUBJECT” to a PST and then simply throw away the PST.

Before we begin make sure the account you are using is NOT a Domain Admin and has read access to the mailstore and all of the mailboxes.  I like setting this permission on the SERVER level and letting it propagte down to the individual mailboxes.  You can’t use a Domain Admin account because Exchange explicitly denies Domain Admins read access at the mailbox level.

Startup exmerge, and choose the “Extract or Import (Two Step Procedure).

This allows us to extract the messages that meet our criteria first before trying to import or restore the messages.

Select "Extract or Import (Two Step Procedure)

So first we perform step 1 to extract the messages.

Select Step 1

Enter the Exchange Server Name and Domain Controller Info and Click  on the “Options” button.

Click on the "Options" button

Just select the “User messages and folders” option on the first tab.  Because we aren’t actually restyoring anything it speeds things up a lot to only process the user’s messages and folders.

On the “Import Procedure” Tab choose the “Archive data to target store”.  In this case the target store is the PST and after the message is extracted it will be deleted from the source store.  This could be really dangerous if you don’t choose any additional selection criteria cause it would extract everything and delete all of the messages from the source mailbox store.

Choose "Archive data to target store"

On the “Folders” tab choose where you want the extract PSTs to be created.

On the “Dates” Tab try to narrow the time as much as possible so fewer messages have to be processed.  In my example I know the administrative assistant sent the mass email on the 26th and today is March 1st so I will scan all messages during that time period.  We go through today because we also want to catch any meails that were forwarded.

Narrow the time as much as possible.

The “Message Details” Option tab is the exciting one.  Here you can enter the subject line that will be extracted from the mailbox store.  You could also enter an attachment name as criteria.  Since we want to catch any of these messages that were forwarded or replied to you would probably want to search for subject like these:

Subject to search for 1
FW: Subject to search for 1
RE: Subject to search for 1

Add the Subject lines to Extract

Click OK when done setting the options and “Next” to begin scanning all of the emails.

Status while searching the mailbox store.

That’s it.  It has to go through every individual users mailbox to search for messages witht he subject of attachment you specified so be patient.