Remove Messages from an Exchange Mailbox

Every once in a while, I get a request on how to easily remove messages from Exchange mailboxes. If you have Exchange 2010, you can use the Search-Mailbox cmdlet to remove messages. This cmdlet is most commonly used when searching mailboxes for items to recover, but can also be used to remove content with the -DeleteContent parameter.

Here is an example, that searches for a message with a specific subject and removes it:

Search-Mailbox -Identity "Byron Wright" -SearchQuery 'Subject:"Insider Info"' -DeleteContent

If you want to remove this message from all mailboxes, you would do it like this:

Get-Mailbox | -SearchQuery 'Subject:"Insider Info"' -DeleteContent

The key to using the cmdlet to remove messages is making sure that your query captures only the messages you want. I strongly suggest verifying the query results first not matter how much of a hurry you are in. The easy way is to use the -LogOnly and -LogLevel parameters. You need to define the log level as Full to capture query results.

Get-Mailbox | -SearchQuery 'Subject:"Insider Info"' -LogOnly -LogLevel Full

Note: Using multi-mailbox search requires an Exchange enterprise client access license for each mailbox searched.