Import Outlook PST File to Exchange 2013 Using Power Shell

Importing a PST File into an Exchange Mailbox is a task which is frequently performed by Exchange Administrators. So to import PST File you can use a Power-Shell command. Power-Shell command is a scripting language which is often used for task automation. It also enables Administrators to remove an existing import request. 

Read this complete article to learn how to import a pst file into Exchange by using the new-mailboximportrequest command.

Complete Description of Import PST

Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server that uses Outlook as an e-mail client to enable all features of a mailing process. Outlook stores its entire data into a PST (or OST) file. There are many situations where Exchange Administrators may need to import a pst file into an Exchange mailbox. 

In order to provide a better way to manage the Exchange import operation, Microsoft introduced a scripting language with Exchange 2007. Before executing import commands, you need to assign some rights to the mailbox, so firstly let's discuss how to assign all rights to a mailbox.

To assign the rights to the mailbox before executing the import command you need to run the command shown below. Remember one thing that even the Administrator's mailbox does not have permission to perform the import operation.             

ManagementRoleAssignment –Role “Mailbox Import Export” –User Mack

Here “Mack” is the user's account name to which you want to assign the import/export role and this way only assigns the role to a single mailbox. If you want to assign this role to more than one mailbox, then you need to create a group and then add the mailboxes names in that group. You can create a group by running the command given below.

 New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role “Mailbox Import Export” -SecurityGroup “MSExchangeGroup”

Here “MSExchangeGroup” is the group name which you have created and you need to add the mailboxes into this group.

Import PST To Exchange 2013 using PowerShell

Now use New-MailboxImportRequest to begin the Exchange import operation. You can create more than one mailbox import request on a single mailbox and every import request you need to specify a unique name for every request. By default Microsoft Exchange automatically generates up to 10 unique names for every import request. If you want to add more than 10 import requests, then you need to specify unique names.

 New-MailboxImportRequest -Mailbox mack -FilePath \\RP-GH03\PST\mack.pst

This command will collect entire data from the source folder to the current mailbox folder structure. Now to import a PST into the targeted folder in an Exchange 2013 mailbox, run the command given below.     

 New-MailboxImportRequest -Mailbox mack -FilePath \\RP-GH03\PST\mack.pst -TargetRootFolder “Old_mail” -IncludeFolders “#Inbox#”

You can use any folder as the destination folder to import a PST and by executing this command, the import task will be inserted in the queue. You can view a progress report in percentages by executing the command given below.

        Get-MailboxImportRequest | Get-MailboxImportRequestStatistics

Conclusion

In this article, I tried to put all information about how to import outlook pst to Exchange mailbox using Power Shell command and I hope this effort is helpful for you.  If the naive user gets any errors using the Powershell commands to Import / Export in the Exchange Admin Centre, follow this Complete Guide to Import PST Files into an Exchange Environment.