Where has the M: Drive gone in Exchange 2003

Thought this would be interesting to anyone who works with Exchange. Exchange 2000 had a nice feature where you could access a virtual M: on the Exchange Server and access individual emails using explorer or even triggering events based on the existence of an email or not.


This feature is turned off by default in Exchange 2003.

Link to Microsoft Exchange Technical Library
http://tinyurl.com/d5ue8 Take a look at the M: drive section of this linked document it's a Microsoft link shortened with http://www.tinyurl.com

In fairness there was good reason to turn this off, as using an anti-virus product to scan this directory or even restoring to this directory was likely to cause corruption

Even without enabling the M: drive you can still access the virtual file system by using the following syntax.

dir file://BackOfficeStorage/mail.swift.local/mbx assuming your mail server’s FQDN was mail.swift.local this would list all the mailboxes in the information store

Hope this helps

Regards Mark