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How to reset "Pending" state for large number of emails in EV?

alfredmjNZ
Level 4
Partner Accredited

Slightly unusual request:  Customer has EV9 and is now looking to de-commission EV and move to Exchange in the Cloud. For the last 12 months they have used a non-standard backup mechanism, meaning that there are over 440,000 emails that are archived in EV, but have not been registered in EV as "being backed up" (archive bit not set).  As they now want to re-inflate exchange with the archived emails I do not want to set the archive bit in EV and then delete almost half a million emails, only to have to re-export them back to Exchange.  Should I just ignore the "pending state" or will this cause issues when I use the export archive wizard to export the archived emails back into Exchange?   Thoughts? 

2 REPLIES 2

daveoflave
Level 4
Employee

Hi Alfred,

   In EV 9 land, if the vault store properties showed Safety Copies were set to "After backup," then in theory yes - the pending items are truly still the full original items.  In which case, you could use 2 methods to revert them:

 

-DocMessageClass (super easy, just a Google will explain all), which is faster

-EV's mailbox policy > Advanced tab > Pending Shortcut Timeout; set this to something small, like 1 day.  Then run archiving in report mode.  This is slower, but I think safer.

 

But here's the thing - both of those are kind of "all or nothing" options.  You're not going to be able to get either of those to only affect the last year's worth of archived emails without serious shenanigans.  For example, you'd have to move all of that "unsecured" mail into a particular folder, and run DocMessageClass against only that folder, or soemthing like that.

But all that's tertiary to your real question - as you export, will EV care that the same pending items are there?  I know it can work just fine, because years ago I got burned accidentally doing the same export 3 times, and guess what?  3 times the emails in the mailbox. 

The thing I don't know off-hand is if the export would even attempt the unsecured items... In which case, it's a non-issue completely.  If it wouldn't, you'd just use either method I listed above to change the pending items back to IPM.Note, and they'd never even know about eachother.  However if it did, and you exported, then you'd just have a functioning, but ugly mess of double messages, one version as IPM.Note, and one as  pending shortcut.  Both would work too, but I'd imagine that would be very annoying to users. 

Hope that helps!

Thanks,
Daveoflave

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

And to add to the above, although the items are 'pending', they are in the archive. This means that when restoring the archive completely, you will get duplicate items. If you know the exact date where this started, you can import the archives using a date range (i.e. all up to 13 july 2016), to avoid duplicates.

To be sure you get everything back, you need to run some tests obviously. It might be in the end you need to make sure EV sees the items as backed up, converts them to shortcuts. Then set your archiving policy to delete shortcuts older than 1 day. Then restore the archive inthe mailbox. (and disable archivnig for that mailbox ofcourse).

If you are going to use a 3rd party tool (TransVault, ArchiveShuttle), you can configure it to migrate to O365 immediately. That would lessen the burden on fixing the mailboxes. You might even want to give everyone an archive mailbox, and migrate to there. Plenty of choices :)

Regards. Gertjan