You may need to move some emails from the archive mailbox to the primary mailbox due to various reasons. In this article, we will look into the reasons for moving back the archive emails to the primary mailbox. We will also discuss the process of unarchiving emails from an archive mailbox of a user or an in-place archive. Before proceeding, let’s take an overview of the archive mailboxes.
What are Archive Mailboxes?
Online Archives or In-Place Archives are separate from the primary mailbox of the user. Instead of the traditional way to export the emails to a local PST, in Exchange Server, you can setup a mailbox database where the archives can be saved. This can improve the performance of live data and the user experience. In addition, you can switch to a slower and cheaper storage solution to store the archives so that the primary mailbox can be on a faster drive.
Moreover, there are retention policies and retention tags which are used by businesses to assist in the cleanup of main mailbox and to comply with the compliance regulations related to data archiving and other rules. When an email satisfies a policy, it is tagged with a specific tag and the retention policy will action the email tagged with the tag. Such tags include archive emails older than 1 year or delete emails older than 10 years.
Why You Need to Move Archive Emails Back to Primary Mailbox?
There could be many reasons why you need to move some emails from the archive mailbox to the primary mailbox, such as:
- There are some important emails that should not be deleted by the retention policy and to be moved to the primary mailbox.
- Some emails are need to be investigated. So, these are to be moved to the primary mailbox.
- There is an issue with the archive mailbox database or the server hosting the mailbox role of the archive.
- The user has mistakenly moved some emails into the archive mailbox.
- To retrieve emails from a leaver or from a shared mailbox.
Methods to Move Emails from Archive to Primary Mailbox
You can follow the below-mentioned methods to unarchive emails.
Method 1: Move Emails from Archive using Outlook
You can use Outlook to move emails from archive to the primary mailbox. This method is ideal if you’re looking to unarchive one or more specific emails. Here are the steps:
Note: To use this method, you need the user’s machine with the profile configured in Outlook. The process involves a bit of manual intervention and time, if emails are in different folders.
- Open Outlook and ensure that both the primary and archive mailboxes are visible.
- Navigate and look for the emails you want to unarchive.
- Right-click on the emails and click on Move > Other Folder.
- Select the folder from the primary mailbox to move into and click OK.
Note: For Shared Mailboxes, the Outlook profile must be set with the user having full-access to the shared mailbox.
Pros and Cons of this Method
Pros
- Easy process that can be performed by the user
Cons
- Not ideal for large movement of data
- No continuation in case of interruption
Method 2: Move Emails from Archive using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS)
You can also use the PowerShell commands in the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to move emails from archive to primary mailbox. In this, the administrator first needs to perform a search on the mailbox and then export that search to PST file. For this method, you need to have the roles for the below commands:
- Search-Mailbox
- New-MailboxExportRequest
To run these commands, you need to have the Mailbox Import Export role assigned.
After fulfilling the above prerequisites, run the below command to perform the search.
Search-Mailbox -Identity "User" -SearchQuery 'Received:<=01/01/2025' -TargetMailbox "User" -TargetFolder "Inbox" -IncludeArchiveThe above command will search the user mailbox with the query for emails older than 01/01/2005 and in the Inbox folder. You can change the –SearchQuery with other filters.
Once the search is complete, you can export the search using the New-MailboxExportRequest command (see the below example).
New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -SourceRootFolder "RecoveryFolderName" -FilePath <unc path to destination>This will export the items from the user mailbox to a PST file.
Pros and Cons of this Method
Pros
- Allows to automate the process
- Fast to search for emails
Cons
- Can only export to PST
- Need scripting skills
- High margin of error
To Conclude
Although you can manage to extract the emails and move them back to primary mailbox from a user mailbox archive or shared mailbox archive, it is a challenge to search and find the items as this may take a considerate amount of time. If you have automatic retention policies, then you need to either suspend the retention policy or remove the policy to ensure that the emails do not move back into the archive as these will be tagged. Also, a lot of time and resources are needed to move emails from an archive to the primary/shared mailbox when dealing with large mailboxes.
You can overcome these challenges by using applications, such as Stellar Converter for EDB. With this application, you can easily open any live or offline database of any Exchange Server version. Once a quick scan is done, you can browse through the entire structure of the database and granularly export emails and other items to PST and other file formats, using advanced search and inline search. You can also export user mailboxes, user archives, shared mailboxes, disabled mailboxes, public folders, and deleted and purged items directly to a live Exchange Server database or Microsoft 365 tenant, with automatic mailbox matching.
