SysAdmin Talk

Testing in an Exchange environment has been a challenge for Red Gate Software for some time now as we developed and tested Exchange Server Archiver. Now we are working on a PST Importer tool, we had to once again ‘fire up’ our virtual servers. The problem was a bit more complex this time, because if we want to create a realistic test environment we should have about a hundred virtual machines that we could hook on to our domain. As before, we’ll need mailboxes for these users but this time we would like some of the PST files to be opened in some of the users’ Outlook (I’ll explain this later). So here’s how we managed to do this all without actually creating all the machines for it.

I recently had a problem where a particular Outlook 2007 plug-in was causing sent e-mail messages to become “stuck” in the Outlook Outbox folder.  The messages had actually been sent, and the “stuck” messages were only visible in Outlook Web Access or non-cached mode.  So that we could remove the messages I needed to find out how many users where affected and how many messages those users had in their Outbox folders.

Fortunately the Exchange Management Shell provides cmdlets for answering these questions, and it can all be done with a PowerShell one-liner.  While I was interested in counting messages specifically in the Outbox folder, the same technique could be used to count messages in any mailbox folder.