Need to move mailboxes quickly?

I'm supposed to have this week off for our company's annual winter break, but like most sysadmins I will end up having to work when everyone else doesn't.

I get the pleasure of moving about 250GB worth of mail around in an effort to get rid of 2 corrupted mailstores. Mailstores that even Microsoft can't fix. I have spent about 15 hours on the phone with Microsoft since Friday - it is now Monday. The original call was to remove a couple of mailboxes that weren't being deleted normally. Somehow a user (it's always the users fault... right? ) of mine managed to create a looped folder in her deleted items box. Imagine a folder structure like this:

Deleted Items

A+

B+

A+

B+

A...B...A...B... for eternity.

I tried everything. Moving the mailbox, disconnecting and reconnecting the mailbox, mfcmapi, pfdavadmin, screaming and pounding on the keyboard. Nothing worked. Microsoft couldn't figure it out either. I now believe that this may be the cause of my latest BackupExec issues alluded to in my previous blog post- a belief that is strong enough that I have actually halted publishing it until I'm sure. Don't get me wrong though, Symantec hasn't made a good product in years...

Microsoft's solution is the same one that I had come up with before I had called them. I have to move all of my mailboxes off the affected mail stores. Which means about 400 mailboxes and 250GB.

Not wanting to sit there and manually move one mailbox at a time, I decided to seek out a powershell script to do the moving for me. I needed something that could read from a CSV file and do a multithreaded (more than one a time) moves. The multithreaded part turned out to be the big problem. Writing a powershell script to move 1 mailbox at a time is something that takes no real effort, but multithreaded requires a little bit more complexity. Since I'm never one to reinvent the wheel, I turned to Google and stumbled (after way too much keyword manipulation) to find a MSExchangeTeam blog article on it.

It allows you to import a CSV file with the following format (I'll save you from trying to find it in the documentation):

Identity,targetmbserver,targetmbsg,targetmbdb

Bob Smith,mailserver,storagegroup,mailboxdatabase

Jane Doe,mailserver,storagegroup,mailboxdatabase

It will then move 4 at a time and display the progress. Perfect. Now if only they could move faster...