Deleting emails from Users Mailboxes

We've all had a moment when a white faced user comes up to us and asks THAT question about recalling emails.

"I've just hit send on a super secret document and CC'd the whole organisation..." they stammer "Is there any way to recall it?"

Well if they've sent it out to the world they're gunna have a bad time... If it's just within their orgnaisation their exchange admins can save the day! 3 lines of powershell and it'll be like it never happened.

LINE NUMBER 1
you need full access rights to the recipients mailbox, your exchange administrator can run this command;

Get-ADGroupMember "THEDISTROLISTTHATGOTTHEEMAIL" | Add-MailboxPermission -identity {$_.name} -User YOU -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All 

LINE NUMBER 2
You need 2 things from the user the subject of their email and the time frame it was sent;

Get-ADGroupMember "THEDISTROLISTTHATGOTTHEEMAIL" | Export-Mailbox -Identity {$_.name} -subject "SUBJECTOFUSERSSHAMEMAIL" –DeleteContent -StartDate "08/07/2013" -EndDate "09/07/2013"

LINE NUMBER 3
Now just cleanup after yourself

Get-ADGroupMember "THEDISTROLISTTHATGOTTHEEMAIL" | Remove-MailboxPermission -Identity {$_.name} -user YOU-AccessRights fullaccess

That's it. Run that and marvel in the power of the shell!

If you've never seen this work before you may be a little trepidatious. So why not try it out on your own mailbox before you pipe a while group through? Just use the includefolders argument and point it at a /test folder;

Export-Mailbox -Identity YOU -includefolders "/TEST" -subject "SUBJECTOFUSERSSHAMEMAIL" –DeleteContent -StartDate "08/07/2013" -EndDate "09/07/2013"