Exmerge

[frikkin]

Hi

I've been lumbered with the task of converting users from Exchange server to a pop3 server. The difficult part of this is making sure that the users get all their data moved locally to their PC in .pst format. This would be fine if exmerge worked like it is supposed to. Unfortunately not. When you run the utility from the server it comes up with some fatal errors. I was told you are supposed to run it from the service account. What exactly is meant by Service Account? (I can only assume Administrator). I run exmerge from the exchange server.

Someone has mentioned that exmerge needs to be in a certain directory.
also It has been said that the service account needs to add itself to have rights on each individual mailbox being converted!

The error i got was using the 2 step method, when using exmerge to copy data to a .pst it came up with errors like below saying it cannot copy files.
[16:18:24] Error copying messages from folder '\Inbox' (MAPI_W_PARTIAL_COMPLETION)
[16:18:24] Trying to copy messages in folder '\Inbox', individually. To avoid duplicates in the target store, messages will be merged and not copied into the target store.
[16:18:25] Error copying message with subject 'Fwd: check out this groove...' in folder '\Inbox'. (MAPI_W_PARTIAL_COMPLETION)
[16:18:26] Error copying message with subject 'RE: Performance Statistics ' in folder '\Inbox'. (MAPI_W_PARTIAL_COMPLETION)


any ideas? I get huundreds of these when using exmerge
Thanks !

 

[C99Arizona]

Exmerge will not work on corrupted mail, a lot of errors I have seen have been with corruption. The Service Account is the account that you are using to start the "Services" for Exchange. As far as the directory goes, I don't think it matters. Good luck.

 

[frikkin]

C99,
Thanks, youre the first person to give me a straight answer to this question, i've been searching for months!!
That makes sense, the users I have been exmerging have all been laptop users who have tried and faied with synchronising offline mail and have been complaining that it does not work. I am just hoping that the normal users wont cause as much hassle!!

 

[ChrisHirst]

this may be late but to add to the info from C99, If you look at the permissions in the Organization properties there will be a user with 'Service Account' status you can also add other service accounts here and you can log on to the server as anyone of these.

 

[frikkin]

Hey chris,
exmerge didnt work, service account or not :O(
the strange thing about it is that i have now run exmerge 6 times on my mailbox and it is not down to 45 errors (at the start it had 830). so i figure, get it down to 0 and then compare it to what i have on exchange still.
what a huge pain though!!

the only alternative is to try build some utility using VB to extract the data from exchange and place it into a .pst using some sort of file transfer. Anyone tried something like this in the past? its going to be fun!

and to be finished by next friday.....i dont think so

thanks!