Badmail folder may prevent the upgrade of Exchange Server

16 Jan 2005

Badmail folder contains mails that can not be transferred, nor returned to the sender. And, in the age of spamming, this folder can contain lots of mails (literally thousands of mails). And the mail flood in this folder can prevent the upgrade of the Exchange Server (from standard Exchange Server to Enterprise version, or, from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003).

You should delete all the mails in this folder if you ever see that the folder prevents the upgrading (you can easily see this: Upgrade takes infinite time and the Exchange setup log stops reporting at the processing of the mailroot folder, which contains badmail folder).

But you may not easily delete all the mails in that folder: If, like one of my client's installation, this folder contains thousands of mails, it takes time to delete all of the mails. You can easily overcome this situation: Do not try to delete the contents, just move (cut-paste) the badmail folder to a differerent location on the same disk partition. When you move a folder, or a file, to a different location on the same disk partition, files or folders do not really move, just their location reference changes. After that, create a fresh folder under the mailroot folder. That's enough for the upgrade process.

Murat Yildirimoglu
www.muratyildirimoglu.com