One thing that really bugged me when Exchange 2007 was released was the removal in the GUI to view mailbox size and total items. I can’t figure out why? Though I’m sure there is something written in 3pt text in an obscure TechNet article somewhere?!?!
In Exchange 2000/3 you would drilled down to your Storage Group / Mailbox Store / Mailboxes. In Exchange 2007/10 it just doesn’t exist. So how to you get this information? PowerShell to the rescue… again. Just another clear indicator that Microsoft wants us using PowerShell more and more. Using Get-MailboxStatistics we can retrieve this basic information and so much more.
Get-MailboxStatistics
Running the Cmdlet by itself without any parameters will list DisplayName, ItemCount, and StorageLimitStatus for all mailboxes.
We can narrow it down to one user by using the following script.
Get-MailboxStatistics –identity “test.user”
If we want to replicate something similar to what we got in Exchange 2000/3 we can use the following script
Get-MailboxStatistics | ft DisplayName, LastLoggedOnUserAccount, TotalItemSize, ItemCount, LastLogonTime
Using the Format-Table cmdlet we can add a number of different columns in addition to the five above. Below are columns we can display and filter on.
AssociatedItemCount
Database
DatabaseName
DeletedItemCount
DisconnectDate
DisplayName
Identity
ItemCount
LastLoggedOnUserAccount
LastLogoffTime
LastLogonTime
LegacyDN
MailboxGuid
ServerName
StorageGroupName
StorageLimitStatus
TotalDeletedItemSize
TotalItemSize
There are a few things we can now do to clean up our report. TotalItemSize is returned to us in Bytes –not very user friendly. So we can convert this to MB. We can also sort our results by this column as well.
Get-MailboxStatistics | sort totalitemsize –Descending | ft DisplayName, LastLoggedOnUserAccount,@{n="Total Size (MB)";e={$_.totalitemsize.value.toMB()}}, ItemCount, LastLogonTime
So now we have something very similar like the old Exchange System Manager would have provided us on the screen. In those days we would simply right click on our Mailbox container and select Export. We can easily achieve the same thing with PowerShell. Many people just redirect this output to a text file –which is fine. The better way is to pipe it to a CSV file
Get-MailboxStatistics | sort totalitemsize –Descending | select-object DisplayName, LastLoggedOnUserAccount,@{n="Total Size (MB)";e={$_.totalitemsize.value.toMB()}}, ItemCount, LastLogonTime | Export-CSV –path ‘c:tempMailboxstats.csv’
Updated: The above line has been modified to include select-object instead of format-table due to using the Export-CSV cmdlet.
We now have a nice comma delimitated output file already sorted by Mailbox size.
Get-MailboxStatistics is a rather simple and easy to use cmdlet. Once you become comfortable using the cmdlet, you can have a number of pre-defined scripts ready to run just how you like.
If you have a lot of mailboxes and want to disregard mailboxes below a certain size you could filter on TotalItemSize. The below example will only return mailboxes greater than 100MB.
Get-MailboxStatistics |where {$_.TotalItemSize -gt 100MB} | sort totalitemsize | select DisplayName,ItemCount,@{n="Total Size (MB)";e={$_.totalitemsize.value.toMB()}} |ft -AutoSize
At a later stage I’ll touch on how to get this report to run to a schedule and email the output to yourself or a manager.
Appendix.
Exchange 2003 Mailbox view
