Scenario: You need to remove messages from a mailbox, but the mailbox is protected under an Organizational Hold (but it could also be a LitHold or a InPlaceHold). Since the message is currently protected, it will not purge out of the mailbox until the hold is expired, or ever, depending on what type of hold is on the mailbox.

Solution:

1. Disable the Hold:
You need to remove the mailbox from the Hold. If its an Organizational hold, add them to the exclusion. If its a LitHold or InPlace Hold, disable the hold.

get-mailbox steveman | Select *hold*
get-organizationconfig | Select *Hold*

2. Get the message to the Purges Folder:
Move the email items into the Purges folder. You can do this by any one of the following:

Manual Purging: Deleting the message from the mailbox within the client, then ‘deleting ‘purge’ the message from the Recoverable Deleted Items (Deletions folder).

Search Mailbox – You could use search-mailbox with -deletecontent -force.

New-ComplianceSearch & New-ComplianceSearchAction : You could use a new-compliancesearch with a new-compliancesearchaction -purge -purgetype HardDelete.

MFCMAPI: You could use MFCMAPI to move the message directly to the purges folder.

3. Disable SingleItemRecovery and RetainDeletedItemsFor:
Run the following:
set-mailbox steveman -singleitemrecoveryenabled:$false – retaindeleteditemsfor 0.00:00:00

4. Start the Mailbox Folder Assistant:
start-mailboxfolderassistant steveman

Note: For steps 3 and 4, give time in between the steps for Replication and settings to go into effect.

Scenario: Need an easy way to convert the [string] value into a number? Specifically for the Search-Mailbox command for the ResultItemsCount and ResultItemsSize?

Solution:

Command:
$Search = Search-Mailbox $mbx -SearchDumpster -SearchQuery Received:1/1/1900..1/1/2013 -EstimateResultOnly

Now convert the results and store in a variable:
Note: $ItemSize is in Bytes.

$ItemCount = ($Search.ResultItemsCount) -as [int]

$ItemSize = (([regex]::match($Search.ResultItemsSize, $regex).Groups[1].value) -replace " bytes","" -as [int])

Scearnio: With a large number of mailboxes in our Exchange Online environment, anytime we run a command where it is get-mailbox -resultsize unlmited, we also run into errors/timeouts due to the amount of time and size it takes.

WorkAround: Use filtering within the get-mailbox command to split the data pull and join them into a Master Variable:

Create Variables

$All = @()
$d = (Get-date).adddays(-730)

Set Filter and Run

$f = “{WhenMailboxCreated -ge ‘$d’}”
$1 = get-recipient -filter $f -resultsize unlimited | select name, windowsliveid,primarysmtpaddress

Change Filter and Run

$f = “{WhenMailboxCreated -lt ‘$d’}”
$2 = get-recipient -filter $f -resultsize unlimited| select name, windowsliveid,primarysmtpaddress

Build the Master Variable to contain both datasets

$All += $1
$All += $2