How to Repair a mailbox in exchange 2010

Hello Friends. I have have been thinking from some time to write an article about how you can repair a mailbox in exchange 2010. Please make a not that you can’t repair a mailbox in Exchange 2007 so in this post i am taking in respect to Exchange 2010. Any Exchange administrator might come across to a scenario where few mailboxes in a mailboxes has gone corrupt at that point in time it is not wise to go ahead and repair the whole mailbox database since it will effect the mail flow of all the users whose mailboxes resides on the mailbox database, In such kind of scenario you can try to repair the mailbox. To repair the mailbox of a user , Open the Exchange management shell and run the below command.

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox Alias -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,Folderview

Below is a snapshot of a mailbox repair request

You can see that the repair request generates a Request ID, If you open the event viewer then you will be able to see an event generated for the above event ID.

you can also use different switches to repair the mailbox of a user, Below are some of the examples.

This example detects and repairs all folder views for the mailbox msft

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox msft -CorruptionType FolderView

This example only detects and reports on ProvisionedFolder and SearchFolder corruption issues to msft’s mailbox. This command doesn’t repair the mailbox since we are using the detectOnly switch.

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox msft -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder -DetectOnly

If there are lot of mailboxes that needs to repaired on a mailbox database then the below powershell command can be used to repair the mailboxes on a mailbox database. The below command will try to repair all the mailboxes in mailbox database.

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database "mailbox database" -CorruptionType AggregateCounts

Even after repairing the mailbox , If the mailbox has corruption then you can always create a new mailbox database and move the mailbox to the new mailbox database.