The exchange team have recently blogged about the new RecovableItems experience in the public preview of the Exchange Admin center, I use EAC on a daily basis and thought I would take a look at this new feature.
I have used this feature numerous times via PowerShell and the Get-RecoverableItems cmdlet. Most don’t know this exists as you need the “Mailbox Import Export” role to be able to use the cmdlet. Default roles like Organization Management do not have access, so you would need to add this to the role group.
The New Exchange admin experience can be accessed via https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com and logging in with your tenant details. Once you are logged in, you can go to Recipients, Mailboxes and select the user you would like to recover mail items for. then click recover deleted items
Earlier on I had deleted a mail item from Adele’s mailbox called urgent. I then used the following search criteria:
- Past 7 days (as Adele had deleted it earlier)
- Subject line search of “Urgent” (Adele had let us know the subject contained the word urgent)
- Apply filter
- The output we were looking for
Now that I have found the mail I am looking for, I am able to restore easily by selected the item and clicking Recover deleted Items.
Powershell
Now, what if I wanted to use Powershell to find the same information I have using the GUI? The cmdlet to use is Get-RecoverableItems. The cmdlet allows for easy searching of the recoverable items as I only need to run the following command:
Once I have found the item I would like to restore I can run:
The command then goes off and recovers the items I have asked it to. Just as the GUI would have done.
Conclusion
The new GUI interface for RecoverableItems is helpful in recovering items from a single mailbox, but when you need to recover items to more than one mailbox the Powershell cmdlet is still the way to do it. I look forward to testing some more of the newer features out of the new Exchange Admin Center. Thanks for reading!