How to list stale resources in Exchange and Office 365

Inactive mailboxes, unused distribution groups or contacts and other empty public folders are a burden for the administrator that should be reduced on a regular basis. Moreover, removing these unnecessary recipients is a measure of common sense economically speaking insofar as their presence consumes resources or licenses that could be better used. Promodag Reports contains several reports to inventory these outdated recipients. They are all automated, which means you can decide to schedule them weekly or monthly to receive them by email.

Identify idle mailboxes

Two different methods can be used to isolate dormant mailboxes: listing those that have not been accessed for a certain time or those that have not sent any message for long.

By using the last logon

You can use the canned report called "Which mailboxes were not used in the last 30 days" that you will find in both the Favorites menu and in the Report Explorer. It is based on the Mailbox Storage Information template and storage size imports. It filters mailboxes by last logon. You can change the value to 60 or 90 days if it suits you better.

The disadvantage of this method is that the last logon attribute may be regularly reset by antivirus or backup software in on-premise Exchange. If this is the case in your environment, then let's move on to the second option.

By filtering mailboxes that have not sent messages for a long time

Again, a personalized report from the Favorites menu is available: Which mailboxes did not send any message in the last 7 days? This one is based on the Mailbox by Traffic Level template and message tracking file imports. You can set this last value as you wish, as long as your database contains enough data to cover the entire reporting period.

This report will also work for distribution groups, public folders and contacts.

Detect unnecessary distribution groups

In most companies, the accounts of departing employees are deleted, but the same is generally forgotten for the distribution groups to which they belonged. After a few years, your directory is cluttered with empty or useless groups that should be discarded. As was the case for mailboxes, Promodag Reports allows you to quickly determine the list of these outdated groups, whether they are empty or unused.

How to list empty groups

It is easy to identify empty groups with the Distribution Groups report template. Simply select them all and sort them by ascending number of members: empty groups appear first.

How to list unused groups

The Distribution Group Usage report template allows you to isolate groups that were not used during the selected reporting period. For this message tracking-based report, this period should again be covered by the content of the database.

Mail contacts

In order to complete this overview of the reports allowing the inventory of unused resources, let us now mention the Mail Contact Usage report which allows, in the same way as Distribution Group Usage, to extract the list of contacts to whom no one sends any more messages.

Clean up your directory with Promodag Reports!

As you have seen, Promodag Reports is the all-in-one solution you need to get rid of Exchange objects that have become useless and cumbersome, especially if you are considering migrating to Office 365 in the short term. Download our reporting tool for a free 45-day evaluation and feel free to contact us for more information or to submit a support request.