How to export a user’s mailbox to .pst in Exchange 2010

Heads up (as of November 2026): This post is from 2015, and Exchange 2010 reached end of support back in October 2020. If you’re on a newer on-premises version of Exchange, New-MailboxExportRequest still works pretty much the same way. Exchange Online doesn’t support it though, so you’ll need a different approach there.

A mailbox export request is a process of exporting mailbox or archive data to a .pst file. It’s very simple to do with Exchange Management Shell.

The first thing you need to know is that Exchange Management Shell is not the same as Exchange Management Console. As the name suggests, the Shell is a Powershell based command-line interface to manage Exchange.

Before you begin

The first thing to keep in mind that you can only export to a UNC path.
Exchange Trusted Subsystem security group needs to have modify NTFS permissions on the destination folder.

Let's export

To export, simply fire up the Exchange Management Shell and use the New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet. Let's assume that the user whose mailbox we are exporting is called "John Doe" and his username is "johndoe"

New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox johndoe -FilePath "\\server\folder\file.pst"

You can start many export requests at the same time. They will be added to the queue.

Note: You may get an error as follows:

The term "New-MailboxExportRequest" is not recognized.

This may happen because of missing roles. In order to resolve this issue, grant the account performing the export request the ‘Import Export Mailbox’ role assignment.

New-ManagementRoleAssignment –Role “Mailbox Import Export” –User "DOMAIN\USER"

Restart your powershell session and try again.

See the export status

To see the status while it is exporting, use this cmdlet:

Get-MailboxExportRequest

You can use various formatting options:

Get-MailboxExportRequest | Format-List

Get-MailboxExportRequest | Format-Wide -Property Mailbox

Get-MailboxExportRequest | Format-Table

Get-MailboxExportRequest | Format-Table -Wrap

Get-MailboxExportRequest | Format-Table -Property Mailbox, Status

Clear completed export requests

Completed mailbox export requests aren't cleared automatically. You can remove fully or partially completed mailbox export requests by using the following cmdlets.

This will remove the export request only for the user “John Doe”.

Remove-MailboxExportRequest -Identity "John Doe\MailboxExport"

This will remove all completed export requests.

Get-MailboxExportRequest -Status Completed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest

To read more about exporting mailboxes, you can check out this TechNet article by Microsoft.

Header photo by Daria Nepriakhina (CC0, via StockSnap)