cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Export of archive has stubbed emails

Kazimir
Level 2

Hi, don't expect much of a resolution to this but I've been askked to investigate this further by the client that I support.

So this client has gone to Hybrid O365 and has decomissioned Enterprise Vault (mostly), the application still exists, it just doesn't archive anything anymore.

One user weas missing a large amount of their items that were supposed to be migrated across to their O365 archive but weren't. I exported their old EV archive for them and imported it in to their O365 mailbox, but they said that all of the emails that they wanted were stubs. So I exported the archive again and they added the PST locally to their mailbox and again stubs.

The users in this environment have a very long history of sharing stubbed emails with eachother and then being unable to access the stub because the email doesn't belong to their archive, etc. So I'm more leaning towards they've been manually archiving these stubs.

6 REPLIES 6

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hello Kazimir,

Having stubs in the archive is in 99.9% due to allowing user to manually archive. Possibly via Vault Cache (if enabled). If you have access to an Outlook with the EV client installed, and have a mailbox which is still 'enabled', you can find out to which archive the stub points. 

This is quite some time ago, so I cannot exactly recall what to do, but you'll see.

Select the EV tab in Outlook. Select the stub to verify. Press CTRL+SHIFT, right click EV icon in the EV tab. Select from there something like properties, and see if you see somethign like 'archiveid' with a value. Copy that id. Open EV console, Expand to Archive. CTRL+SHIFT, right click, select search folder or archive. Paste number. That should give the archive the stub is from. I think that will be a different archive as to what the user thinks it is.

The only thing I can think of is to verify the stubs, and give users access to the mailbox where these stubs reference to.

 

Regards. Gertjan

Hey GertjanA

Yeah so that is basically the issue that I was trying to tell the client - The stubs existed because they were manually archived as stubs. Unfortunately we don't have any EV addin for Outlook in the environment anymore. They can access the vaults using the web link and if they click the links in the stubs (and have access) it will go to the email in the vault store.

Basically I'm just trying to explain to them that the only way they're going to unstub these emails is to manually go to every single stubbed email they need and download a copy of the original email.

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hi Kazimir,

So, they can still open a stub? Can they not see/check which archives are used by that? 
I'm sure that as soon as you can show that a stub coming from an archive export points to a different archive, it should be clear right?

A second check might be (if the EV Console is still available) to check if the message classes defined not accidentally included stubs. (rightclick Site name, properties, tab Exchange Message Classes. Should not have IPM.EnterpriseVault.*)

If it does not, then (as you said already) the only option would be users archived these stubs manually. 

Regards. Gertjan

Hey,

So - Yes the stubs can be opened and redirect to links that are in:

  • The users archive
  • Archives that the user has access to
  • Archives that the user doesn't have access to

On the last point, it's just a matter of granting them access to that archive if they need it. I've also checked and EV was not configured to auto-archive stubs, so it's 100% manual archiving that has caused the issue. The problem is that I've already told them that manual remediation of this issue is required. The user will have to go and:

  1. Open the stub
  2. Go to the link
  3. Download the original copy

But they have rejected that solution and want us to automatically resolve this, because there are about 70,000 stubbed emails in this person's archive. That number is not some arbitrary estimate... there are actually that many. It's >7 years worth of a bad habit of manually archiving stubs.

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

So you need to do this for 1 user? I don't know how to do that, but it might be possible. 

It is not EV functionality, it will require a custom solution. I would advise your customer that is going to cost him..

Regards. Gertjan

Prone2Typos
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

If you are looking for a solution to this issue, the product I manage can restore (what we call) foreign shortcuts during an archive migration. It sounds like you have approached your archive migration without a migration solution and I am sure you have gone to great lengths to address the many nuances that come along with a manual migration. I am afraid this is another one, and is a feature we added last year for EV migrations. I am not aware of other vendors who can do this. If your problem is large, then you may need to look at selectively migrating the users in question using a solution like Quadrotech's Archive Shuttle. I work as the product manager for it.... in the spirit of full disclosure.