How to extract attachments from Exchange 2003 database

Posted by John on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by John
Published on 2012-06-20T06:17:49Z Indexed on 2012/06/20 9:18 UTC
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I have an ancient Exchange 2003 server that I'm getting ready to retire. All user accounts have been migrated to Google Apps for Business, so no new mail is being sent or received on the server. There are less than 50 accounts on the server, but some are very large so that the whole Exchange database is between 10 and 20 GB. The largest account has over 100,000 messages.

I believe that in the migration to Gmail, some attachments were not migrated. For peace of mind, I'd like to get the attachments out of the Exchange database. The only way I know of to do this is to set up a 2nd computer with Outlook on it, set up one of the accounts, and then sync the whole mail history and get the attachments out that way.

Is there something simpler that I can do? Here are two possibilities:

  • An Exchange attachment retrieval tool/script that pulls attachments for all accounts directly out of the Exchange database.
  • An Exchange PST exporter tool/script that will export PST files for all accounts so that I can just load the PST files into Outlook at will.

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