Delete E-mails From Users' Mailbox

I see a lot of posts of people asking how to delete certain e-mails from their users’ mailboxes.

It is very simple and it is done using the Export-Mailbox command.

Imagine that we want to delete e-mails from exchange@microsoft.com from any of my folders. In this case we would simply do:

Export-Mailbox nuno@letsexchange.com -SenderKeywords exchange@microsoft.com -DeleteContent

Because you are not using the –TargetMailbox option and we are using –DeleteContent, all the e-mails that match the search criteria won’t be exported to anywhere but actually deleted.

But, of course, we can do searches a lot more complex. For example, let’s delete:
- all e-mails from every folder except the Deleted Items folder
- that were sent from exchange@microsoft.com with the subject “Test E-mail”
- and that are older than one month:


[DateTime] $date1Month = [DateTime]::Now.AddMonths(-1)

Export-Mailbox nuno@letsexchange.com -SenderKeywords exchange@microsoft.com -SubjectKeywords "Test E-mail" -EndDate $date1Month -ExcludeFolders "\Deleted Items" -DeleteContent -Confirm:$False


If you are doing this on a script for a list of users, you can also do something like:

(...)
ForEach (...)
{
 $strDeleted = Export-Mailbox $strMbxToSearch -SenderKeywords exchange@microsoft.com -SubjectKeywords "Test E-mail" -EndDate $date1Month -ExcludeFolders "\Deleted Items" -DeleteContent -Confirm:$False


 $intTotalDel = $strDeleted.StandardMessagesDeleted
 Write-Host "Searched $strMbxToSearch and deleted $intTotalDel"
}

Note that all the deleted e-mails will go to the user’s dumpster, not to the Deleted Items folder.