How to Mail-Enable/Disable Public Folders in Exchange?

Read time 5 minutes

Organizations are greatly depending on the public folders for their core business processes owing to the ease of deployment and convenience of sharing the content among the users.

Public folders in Microsoft Exchange Server can be accessed or used by multiple users given they have permissions to do so. Outlook users can share any information thorough this commonly shared public folder. The authority to assign the permissions to access the public folder lies with the Exchange administrator, and the permissions can be assigned to all the users in the Exchange. Users can share and access contacts, emails, templates, notes, calendar items, journal entries, custom attributes within public folders.

Mail-Enabled Public Folders in Exchange

Mail-enabling of public folders is a great feature liked by the organizations. There can be a question in the minds of the readers about the use of mail-enabled public folders. Here is the answer for all of you – with a mail-enabled public folder having SMTP address, you can receive emails directly to it. This helps in developing a shared environment in the organization and providing centralized email delivery for teams and departments facilitating sharing of information among multiple users. Emails can be moved from a common email address set via public folder.

There are situations when you want to control mail flow to your public folder in Exchange Server. For that, Exchange administrator has the authority to modify the permissions or settings, and mail-enable/disable a particular public folder. Let us see in what way he can perform this mail enabling and disabling action on a public folder.

Exchange administrator can use Exchange Admin Center as well as Exchange Management Shell to perform the mail-enable/disable the public folder.

1. Log in to EAC (Exchange Admin Center) with Exchange administrator credentials.
2. Go to public folders and then select public folders. Select the public folder you want to set mails settings for. Under Mail settings, click on Disable option if already enabled. In reverse case, click on the Enable option if already Disabled.
   
3. A warning message is displayed. Select Yes to confirm the setting.
   

Hence, you will see the changes under Mail settings (the status has been changed to Disabled now).

Another way to perform this action is via Exchange Management Shell. You can run the cmdlets to enable/disable mails in any public folder.

Open the Exchange Management Shell and run the given cmdlets:

• To disable the emails in public folders, run this cmdlet –
  Disable-MailPublicFolder -Identity “New-Public-Folder”

  
  Here, New-Public-Folder is the name of the public folder for which settings are performed. Executing the command will ask for the confirmation. Enter “Y” to confirm the action. Thus, the public folder is now mail-disabled.

• Similarly, to mail-enable the public folder in Exchange Server, execute this command.
  Enable-MailPublicFolder -Identity “Public folder name”

Therefore, we understood how to mail-enable or disable the public folders in Exchange. Any of the methods can be executed. Using Exchange Admin Center seems easier as some technical knowledge is required to execute the cmdlets in the Exchange Management Shell.

Using public folders in Exchange is a common affair today. But what will happen if these folders are corrupt or the content in it is inaccessible? Due to some misfortunes like power supply shutdown, application interference, hardware failure, etc., Exchange mailboxes and public folder data may become unavailable to the users.

Manual methods for Exchange server data recovery are tedious and unreliable in practice. Today’s Exchange administrators have no extra time to spend. They require such software that fulfills all the requirements and gives desired results instantly. Kernel for Exchange Recovery is an advanced solution that can recover mailbox from an EDB file, lost or inaccessible including public folders. It provides selective recovery with smart data filters and selection options. After the recovery of public folders, users can save the recovered data to several destinations including Live Exchange, Outlook PST file, Office 365, etc.

Conclusion

We have discussed the role of public folders in Exchange Server and the ways to mail enable them. Methods to enable and disable mails in public folders are given in detail. The professional Exchange Server Recovery tool to recover Exchange public folders is also mentioned here for reference. Hope this article have cleared some queries of your about Exchange public folders!