I recently worked with Microsoft on an issue where a user and the administrator were unable to recover a public folder item from Outlook using Recover Deleted Items.

deleteditems

Why would I do this?  My user may have accidentally deleted an item from their public folder that they didn’t intend to.

Issue

It turns out that there is a bug in Exchange 2010 public folders that causes Deleted Item Retention to lose track of the messages original location.  It doesn’t sound like there will be a fix for this within Exchange 2010, but will work fine in Exchange 2013 due to the new mailbox format used for public folders.  So what are the options to working around this issue with Exchange 2010?

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Resolution

  1. Attempt to use ExFolders to recover your deleted item
  2. Restore the Public folder database to recover the deleted item

For additional detail on how to work through these resolution options, please use the following link which outlines how to do these recoveries quite nicely.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/02/06/recovering-public-folders-after-accidental-deletion-part-1-recovery-process.aspx