Deleting Public Folder Mailboxes

Sophia 356 Reputation points
2021-08-30T16:10:39.703+00:00

So a week ago we tried to migrate our on premise public folders (Modern public folders) to exchange online using "Use Batch migration to migrate Exchange Server public folders to Exchange Online"

For whatever reason the migration couldn't complete and we had to "Revert back to on premise" but now we see a list of 5 new Public Folder Mailboxes on our on-premise exchange.

They all are Secondary Hierarchy and they all have 1.78MB of data. As per Microsoft they are saying that those were created by mistake and now can be deleted.

So, my question is can we safely delete them without causing any issues? has anyone seen anything like this before?

Exchange Server Management
Exchange Server Management
Exchange Server: A family of Microsoft client/server messaging and collaboration software.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
7,349 questions
Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Management
Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Management
Microsoft Exchange: Microsoft messaging and collaboration software.Hybrid Management: Organizing, handling, directing or controlling hybrid deployments.
1,886 questions

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  1. KyleXu-MSFT 26,211 Reputation points
    2021-08-31T02:16:08.577+00:00

    @Safs-3080

    Check about "Public Folders" in ECP, if there doesn't exist Public Folder hosted on those Public Folder Mailbox, you will could delete them without issue. If there exist Public Folder on those Public Folder Mailbox for balance, I would suggest you move data and delete that folder first.

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  2. Amit Singh 4,846 Reputation points
    2021-10-06T10:16:13.55+00:00

    You can run the below cmdlet to return and delete public folder mailboxes for the Secondary Hierarchy type:

    Get-Mailbox -PublicFolder | where {$_.IsRootPublicFolderMailbox -eq $False} | Remove-Mailbox -PublicFolder

    And for Primary Hierarchy type, you can use:

    Get-Mailbox -PublicFolder | where {$_.IsRootPublicFolderMailbox -eq $true} | Remove-Mailbox -PublicFolder

    Then you can go into ADSI and edit.

    Browse to Configuration\Services \Microsoft Exchange\ {org name} and view the properties of the org.

    Now Find msExchDefaultPublicFolderMailbox and clear it.

    If the issue persists, you could shut down the server host PFs and mark sure it will not affect Exchange Online PFs. Then remove the Exchange server from ADSI.

    I hope this will help you.

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