Public folder items failing to delete

Question

Hi All,

I am having an issue with public folders on 2 of my servers (in different domains). One of the servers is 2013 and the other is 2016 (we will be moving both to EoL very soon).

As part of the migration plan we have asked users to kill as man emails off that are currently located in their public folders. As far as we know they have been doing this, and we now have a situation where the users are getting the message:

"Some items cannot be deleted. They were either moved or already deleted, or access was denied"

This is for any email they try to delete in the public folders. I have checked permissions and tried with my own account which is owner of all the folders, but I get the same response.

If we reboot the server we are able to delete them again, but I am not sure this is really a full solution to the issue.

Has anyone had this issue before, or have any ideas how I can resolve it?

Thanks

Andy

Answer 1

You can set per folder: IF you set to 0, none will be retained. It may take some time to apply

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-publicfolder?view=exchange-ps

-RetainDeletedItemsFor

The RetainDeletedItemsFor parameter specifies the retention time for deleted items.

Or for all the public folders:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-organizationconfig?view=exchange-ps

-DefaultPublicFolderDeletedItemRetention

The DefaultPublicFolderDeletedItemRetention parameter specifies the default value of the length of time to retain deleted items for public folders across the entire organization. This attribute applies to all public folders in the organization that don't have their own RetainDeletedItemsFor attribute set.

Answer 2

That often means the recover deleted items quota has been exceeded.

Go to the folder, access the "Recover Deleted Items" menu for that folder, then purge all the items you see.

Then try to delete the items from the public folder again.