Chapter 12: Managing Folder Content

Overview

Over the years, we have seen many different approaches to managing users' mailbox content and purging older mailbox content. The need to control mailbox content and size is often due to limited disk space for mailbox databases but it may also be due to company security policies or regulatory compliance.

Seasoned Exchange Server administrators are probably familiar with the Exchange 2000/2003 Mailbox Manager function. Heck, you may even be familiar with the Exchange 5.5 Mailbox Cleanup Agent. These tools gave the administrator some control over how long content was kept in a user's mailbox folder. The administrator could configure these tools to delete information in a mailbox if it was older than the specified number of days or larger than a specified size.

Many organizations are now employing archival solutions that will remove content from users' mailboxes and store it on long-term storage such as tape, optical, network attached storage (NAS), or storage area networks (SANs). In some cases, archival solutions are put in place merely to reduce the size of the Exchange databases but still allow users long-term access to their old mail data. In other cases, an organization is required to keep certain types of message content such as financial data, official company communications, and healthcare-related data.

Mailbox archiving has raised new issues and challenges for the Exchange administrator as well as the archive system administrator. There are certainly messages that users or departments will want to keep for a long time, but probably not every message in the user's Inbox. There has to be some method of determining which messages should be retained or archived, such as moving important messages to special folders.

Organizations that are concerned about meeting regulatory requirements with respect to message archiving and long term retention of certain types of messages may also be interested in keeping a journaled copy of messages.

In this chapter, we are going to cover some of the new features of Exchange 2007 with respect to messaging records management, and we'll discuss how features included in the Exchange 2000/2003 Mailbox Manager function are now included with Exchange 2007.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Basics of messaging records management

• Managing default folders

• Creating and managing custom folders

• Assigning managed folder mailbox policies

• Configuring Exchange 2007 servers to supporting messaging records management