In Exchange 2007, Microsoft has all but removed the ability to use ExMerge in working with Exchange mailboxes.  They now encourage you to use the Export-Mailbox cmdlet which sounds like a great idea… until you actually try to use it.

I’ve come across a handful of things that were especially irritating when using the export-mailbox cmdlet so I thought it might be good to share them here.

The first thing I ran into was:  “The specified module could not be found., error code: -1073282946” Gosh, that sure is a helpful message.  Maybe it would be easier to troubleshoot if you told me what specified module you were looking for!  Ok, not to worry, I have run into this on more than one occasion and the common thread seems to be the installation or uninstallation of Outlook or the Exchange management tools.  To fix this error, simply open a command prompt (can also be done from PowerShell or EMS) and type fixmapi.  That’s it, no special parameters or crazy syntax, just fixmapi.

I should also point out that the previous module could not be found error message also in some cases caused the Exchange Management Shell to crash completely.  In these cases it also left NO traces of its crash in any event log that I could find.

Now the export-mailbox cmdlet should work right?  Well… not exactly…

Instead of a freshly exported PST file, I am greeted by another helpful error message “Failed to copy messages to the destination mailbox store with error MAPI or an unspecified service provider” the error message goes on and has some meaningless numbers associated with it, but you get the point.  There are a couple of causes for this but to my knowledge there is little information out there on how to fix it.

1. You may not have permissions to the mailbox.  If this is the case you need to run the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlet.  If you have never worked with this cmdlet then you may have found your solution.
2. The account that you are running the Export-Mailbox cmdlet with MUST have an Exchange mailbox itself.  I know this might sound silly, but it is not uncommon to have separate admin accounts separate from your normal user accounts that do not have mailboxes.
3. I have read on a couple of forums that using some of the more advanced features of the Export-Mailbox cmdlet, such as the -EndDate parameter will also cause this error.  Also from what I have read, there is currently no fix for this.  Again this is what I have read… your mileage may vary.

Hopefully these quick tips will help someone save a few hours of wasted time on trying to do something as simple as export a mailbox.