How to use NewMailboxRepairRequest in Exchange Server

In your Exchange organization, you might from time to time have to repair a mailbox or mailboxes. Many times, users are unaware that their mailboxes have corrupt items in or that the mailbox is corrupt.

On the server-side though, Event ID 10062 will log on the server where the mailbox is located, and these events will repeat constantly until a repair on the mailbox is done.

Before we head into the repair side of things, there are a few things you need to take into consideration when performing a repair of a mailbox or multiple mailboxes or running the repair against the actual database.

When a repair is issued against the mailbox, mailbox access is disrupted for the duration of the repair however all other users will be able to work without issue.If you run this repair against a mailbox database, then only the mailbox that is being repaired will be disrupted.

Take Note: that once you start the repair, you cannot stop it unless you dismount the entire store in Exchange which will then affect all users and not just the user’s mailbox that is being repaired.

Microsoft have set limits to avoid performance issues. This includes only one repair request is allowed for a database level repair and up to 1000 requests can be active at any given time for a mailbox level repair per server.

Moving forward, what items can you repair when you use the New-MailboxRepairRequest command? Here are the 4 items:

• Search Folder Corruptions
• Aggregate counts on folders that don’t reflect the correct values
• Views on folders.
• Provisioned folders that are not pointing correctly to the parent folders.

The 4 corruption types you will use in the command are as follows:

• SearchFolder
• AggregateCounts
• FolderView
• ProvisionedFolder

To run the command New-MailboxRepairRequest, you need to ensure you have permission in Exchange to do so or you won’t find the command to run or get an access denied error message.

Here are a list of the Event ID’s logged and what they mean. We already spoke about Event ID 10062 in the beginning of the article.

Here are a few examples of commands that can be run against a users mailbox or against a mailbox database:

• New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox User1 -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder -DetectOnly

To run a repair against a mailbox, you can run the following command in the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):

• New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox User@domain.com -CorruptionType FolderView

The above command goes and detects and repairs all folder views for the mailbox listed above, user@domain.com

• New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox User1 -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,Folderview -Archive

The above command detects and repairs all corruption types for User1’s mailbox including their Archive.

• New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database DB01 -CorruptionType AggregateCounts

The above command detects and repairs AggregateCounts for all mailboxes on mailbox database DB01.

You will need to monitor the event logs for the different Event ID’s to see how far the repair is etc. and if it has fixed the corruption detected.

You can also look at using Stellar Repair for Exchange and it can repair large .EDB files and can also export recovered mailboxes back into your Exchange Server or Office 365

Do not worry about support for Exchange, software supports from version 5.5 to Exchange 2019.

Give Exchange Recovery tool a go, you won’t be sorry as it never fails to deliver each time for multiple scenarios and for any version of Exchange.