XADM: Public Folders and Deleted Item Recovery in Exchange Server

ID: Q246037

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Exchange Server, version 5.5

SUMMARY

The item recovery process in Exchange Server 5.5 has made it much easier to recover the contents of public folders. The recovery process does not recover all properties of the original public folder. The "More Information" section discusses some of the major implications of recovering a public folder through item recovery.

MORE INFORMATION

You can recover most properties of a public folder such as content, permissions, forms associated with the folder, and folder rules. However, the following items will be recovered but altered:

The Display Name and Obj-Dist-Name attribute of that folder will be appended by the word "recovered", for example:
/o=XADM/ou=SITE1/cn=Recipients/cn=NPF
2947606749476067494760674584AC1000007DD
/o=XADM/ou=SITE1/cn=Recipients/cn=NPF2(RECOVERED)
947606749476067494760674584AC1000007DE
The directory object is recreated and causes a replication of both the folder content and directory object to other servers in the site as well as other sites if replicas have been created. Attributes that are linked to the public folder are also altered by this re-creation, including USN created, USN changed, and object Version Number. The folder will have a new creation date.

The word "recovered" is appended to the e-mail addresses of that folder such as SMTP, X.400, cc:Mail, plus others depending on the connectors installed.

This could also be an issue if a user is sending mail to the old address by replying to a message or if the e-mail address is being stored in either an offline address book or personal address book.

Changing the Display Name of the folder has no effect on the addresses.

It resets the public folder replica lists, and they must be re-created.

Additional Information

In a public folder, the views are not stored with the folder but are kept in a separate system folder. These views are referenced by the public folders as a back link. Therefore, if you recover the folder or move or copy it to a .pst file, the link back to the view is broken, and views are lost.

This is different from the Views in mailboxes, which are stored as hidden folders within individual mailboxes. For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q228934 XCLN: Understanding Deleted Item Recovery

Q180117 XADM: Recovering Deleted Items from a Public Folder

Q189300 Unable to Recover Nested Public Folder

Additional query words: dumpster

Keywords : exc55
Version : winnt:5.5
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbinfo