I had a scenario come up where someone had 50 or so PST files. I wanted to add them all into their mailbox, but have a separate folder for each PST’s contents to go to.

This was on Exchange 2010 SP3 but should apply to newer versions too, and this is assuming you have at least Exchange 2010 SP1 – importing was done differently before this.

For starers, ExchangeServerPro covers the basics of PST importing. PeteNetLive delves a bit deeper into batch importing, which was close to what I wanted but had to modify somewhat.

I had the PST files in a UNC path, so started by navigating there – in Powershell, you can just ‘cd //server/sharename/’ (even though “cd” is an alias for “Set-Location”, I can’t help but use it!)

Once in the share that contains the PST files (and it HAS to be a share, can’t be an admin $ share, and needs the correct permissions as per ExchangeServerPro’s article), you can run this command:

dir *.pst | %{ New-MailboxImportRequest -BatchName Recovered -Mailbox alias -name $_.BaseName -FilePath “$_.” -TargetRootFolder $_.BaseName}

This will get the list of files, and run a mailbox import request against each one. “alias” needs to be changed to the mailbox name. The Filepath is just being called as itself “$_.” and the Target Root Folder is using BaseName, which is the filename without the extension .pst.

I’m also using the filename as the name for the job, if you leave that out it’ll hit a wall after 10 jobs and want a unique name (if not specified, the name is MailboxImport, then MailboxImport1, MailboxImport2 etc and hits a wall at MailboxImport9). That also makes it easy if one of the jobs fail, to work out which PST was involved.

This worked really well for me, so hopefully it helps someone else out there!