Applies to: Exchange Server 2010 SP3, Exchange Server 2010 SP2

Topic Last Modified: 2011-03-19

You can use Exchange Management Shell cmdlets or the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) to create a discovery search. Search results are copied to the discovery mailbox selected as the target mailbox for the search.

Looking for other management tasks related to search? Check out Managing Discovery.

Caution:
Not specifying any source mailboxes to search will result in searching all mailboxes on all Exchange 2010 servers in the entire Exchange organization.

Not specifying a search query will result in the entire content of the specified mailboxes being copied to the target mailbox.

Depending on the scope of the search and the number and size of items returned, the discovery mailbox you select to store search results can potentially grow to a large size. Make sure the disk volumes where the mailbox database and transaction logs are located have adequate free space.

If you use mailbox quotas to limit mailbox sizes, be sure to configure the target mailbox with an adequate quota limit to allow sufficient storage for items returned by the search.

What Do You Want to Do?

Use the Shell to create a discovery search

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Multi-Mailbox Search" entry in Messaging Policy and Compliance Permissions topic.

This example creates the discovery search Contoso-Case1. The search will return e-mail messages that meet the following conditions:

  • Contain the words Contoso and Project A

  • Sent or received from January 1, 2009, through December 31, 2009

The search is run against all mailboxes within all Exchange 2010 Mailbox servers in the organization. Search results will be saved in the mailbox Discovery Search Mailbox, in a folder with the same name as the search. Full logging is enabled for the search.

Copy Code 
New-MailboxSearch -Name "Contoso-Case1" -StartDate "1/1/2009" -EndDate "12/31/2009" -TargetMailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -SearchQuery '"Contoso" and "Project A"'-MessageTypes Email -IncludeUnsearchableItems -LogLevel Full

For detailed parameter and syntax information, see New-MailboxSearch.

Note:
By default, a discovery search doesn't include items that can't be indexed by Exchange Search. To include such items in the search results, the IncludeUnsearchableItems switch is included in the preceding command.

Other Tasks

After you create a discovery search, you may also want to: