XADM: Specifying a Range of Mailboxes for ExMerge to Process

You may want to use the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Merge program (ExMerge.exe) to process only a certain set of mailboxes. This article explains how to configure ExMerge 2000 to process only a certain set of mailboxes.

To process only a certain set of mailboxes, you must run the ExMerge 2000 program in batch mode.

To use the ExMerge program to process a set of mailboxes, you need to specify the indexes at which you want the ExMerge program to start and end processing of mailboxes. For example, if the ExMerge program extracts 500 mailboxes on a server, you can use the .ini file settings to specify that the program process mailboxes that start at index 0 and end at index 250. If you do this, you can create multiple .ini files so that multiple instances of the ExMerge program can process different groups of mailboxes on the same server. Previously, to achieve this in batch mode you had to explicitly list the mailboxes that you wanted to process.

To use the ExMerge program to process a certain set of mailboxes on a server:

1. Set the following .ini file entries:
   1. StartingIndex = {index at which ExMerge starts to process mailboxes}
   2. EndingIndex = {index at which ExMerge stops processing mailboxes}
2. Specify the name of your Exchange Server computer by using the "SourceServerName" .ini file setting, or use the -srcserv command line option to specify the source server at the command line.
3. (Optional) If you are running Exchange 2000 Server or later, you can specify a list of databases that you want ExMerge to extract the list of mailboxes from by using the "FileContainingListOfDatabases" .ini file setting. If you do not specify a list of databases, the ExMerge program extracts a list of all mailboxes on the specified server.
4. Specify the .ini file on the command line, using the -f option, when you run ExMerge.exe. Use a command line that is similar to the following:
   exmerge -b -f c:\exmerge.ini

NOTE: The actual set of mailboxes that ExMerge processes is relative to the list of mailboxes that ExMerge extracts, which in turn depends on the settings that you specify in the .ini file. In other words, the indexes point to a different range of mailboxes if you extract all of the mailboxes on a server than the indexes point to if you extract the mailboxes only on a set of databases.

The list of mailboxes is sorted by "Display Name."