Reports Section

Folders View

The Folders View is the primary view for a report. This view will list all folders discovered during a report generation session. There are a large number of data elements that can be collected per folder, and the availability of various data elements is control by settings in the report generator configuration.
For example, if the option to collect permission information is not enabled in the report configuration, the data will be empty [or zero, for numeric info] for those related elements.

The Folders View also provides access to the Folder Live View window, which can connect to an Exchange Public Folder directly and render the items of the folder for inspection or manipulation. Click here to jump to the Folder Live View documentation page.

Folder List

Filter to Selected Folder

Highlight Large Item Counts

Highlight Large Folders Sizes

Folder Search

Folder Live View

Export Grid to CSV

Folder Types

Made for viewing

Data, and more data!

Show/Hide Folder Detail

Folder Metadata Columns

Highlight Large Item Counts

This feature will color the certain cells in the Item Count column based on the quantity of items for each folder.
Folders with large item counts – regardless of whether it is a Public Folder or Mailbox Folder – are very taxing on an Exchange server, and can be frustrating or disruptive to end users. Consider that the exchange server, for each request to “open” a folder, must load in to memory the entire list of items of that folder. While the list would only be of a few key columns (EntryID, index number, etc), it must hold this in-memory list for the entire duration that the folder is “open”, regardless of whether a user or application is actively doing anything. In the case of a public folder, if 10 users open the same folder, that becomes 10 separate in-memory “lists” held by the server. When item counts become very large (in excess of 100,000 items) the amount of RAM needed to hold this list starts to grow non-linearly, and often ends up with some of the list in swap-file cache.

For end-users, when a folder has more than about 15,000 items, they tend to see a delay in the display of the list of items. Consider that for public folders, shared mailboxes, and shared folders, these connections are not backed by Outlook’s cached mode (aka OST file) implementation. These connections are live to the Exchange server each time. If the physical distance between the end-user and the Exchange server is more than a few dozen miles, the network latency between the client and server exacerbates the delay. This is even more prevalent with Office 365, which typically shows a 20-50ms latency. With Office 365, a folder with 15,000 items can take several seconds to render the list of items for use. The delay is long enough for most user to think that Outlook is broken. This is in contrast to Exchange on-premises and a user being at a LAN connection to the Exchange server.

The Highlight Large Item Counts feature will highlight cells with large items counts with the following criteria:

• < 5,000: No color
• 5,000 – 14,999: Khaki
• 15,000 – 49,999: Gold
• 50,000 – 99,999: Orange
• >= 100,000: Maroon

Highlight Large Folder Sizes

Nearly identical to the coloring of the topic above [Highlight Large Item Counts], this feature will color the cells of the Folder Size column when values are greater than 1GB.

Unlike the concern mentioned above with server memory and end-user experiences, folder sizes are important to review and remediate due to support limits that exist in Exchange 2013, 2016, 2019 and Office 365. In these later versions of Exchange, Microsoft has set a “support limit” of 10GB per folder. This limit only refers to the total item size of given single folder, not the size of the entire subtree. Additionally, note that the “support” limit does not mean that a folder cannot exceed 10GB, however it is highly discouraged to allow this; if issues do arise, Microsoft has refused to provide support for such cases.

The coloring criteria for folder sizes are as follows:

• < 1GB: No Color
• 1GB to 7GB: Khaki
• 7GB to 10GB: Orange
• > 10GB: Maroon

Exchange 2013 and later can view/manage the per-folder size limit in two ways:

• Organization Level
• Folder Level

Get-/Set-OrganizationConfig

# The 'Get-' command will retrieve the 2 values shown.
# New installs of Exchange and new Office 365 tenants
# default to 2GB and 1.7GB for the 2 values.
# they can be adjusted to any value, but the support limit is 10GB (and the warning then becomes 9GB).
PS:> Get-OrganizationConfig | Select DefaultPublicFolderProhibitPostQuota, DefaultPublicFolderIssueWarningQuota
# This command will set the 2 values to the support limit,
# with the warning limit at 10% less than max.
PS:> Set-OrganizationConfig -DefaultPublicFolderProhibitPostQuota 10GB -DefaultPublicFolderIssueWarningQuota 9GB

Get-/Set-PublicFolder

# The 'Get-' command will retrieve the prohibit and 
# warning limits for a specific public folder.
PS:> Get-PublicFolder -Identity \Folder\Path\To\Inspect | Select ProhibitPostQuota, IssueWarningQuota
# This will set the prohibit and warning limits
# On a specific public folder, which overrides
# the Organizational level settings.
PS:> Set-PublicFolder -Identity \Folder\Path\To\Change -ProhibitPostQuota 10GB -IssueWarningQuota 9GB

Folder Search

This feature allows for filtering the list of folders by a search pattern. Clicking the button will toggle the search feature, and if toggled off will clear the current search and list all folders.

Filter Options

The search filter feature uses Microsoft .NET’s Regular Expression pattern matching engine, comparing each folder path to the given pattern.
For simple searches, no wild-card characters are necessary. For example, filtering the view to all folders with the text ‘Sales’ in the folder path can be entered solely as: Sales.

Here are some common search filter examples:

Selected Folder Detail Panel

When a folder is selected in the list view, the    button will open with further detail about the folder, as seen below.

Folder Size Breakdown

Item Dates Breakdown

Copy Detail

Per-Folder Detail

Senders View

The Senders View shows all email accounts that have sent to, or have been the author of items in folders.

Display Name

Email Address

X500

Is Group

Sender Occurrences

Occurrences

Item Types View

The Item Types view shows all the item types found in folders. Item type examples are IPM.Appointment (calendar items), IPM.Note (messages), and IPM.Task (task items). There are many standard and non-standard item types and the value is stored in Exchange as a simple text value. As such, there can be an infinite number of item types and 3^rd party applications can use custom types in order to identify them.

Item Type List

Folder List

Attachment Types View

The Attachment Types view shows all the attachment file types found across all items in folders.
Note that an attachment can be hidden or visible. This setting determines whether the attached data can be saved as a file by an end user. Commonly, hidden attachments are used by mail clients as inline graphics in rich-text or html-based email bodies. As such, “hidden” does not necessarily mean “not visible”. Furthermore, it is then possible to see the same file extension twice in the report. This indicates that some number of items had the attachment file type hidden, while some other number of items had the file type as a visible, saveable file.

Attachment File Types List

Body Patterns View

The Body Patterns View shows the configured pattern matching value from the generator. For each pattern, the number of folders with at least one item matching the pattern is shown, and selecting a pattern will show the list of folders that have those matching items.

Ignore Case

Subject Patterns View

The Subject Patterns View shows the configured pattern matching value from the generator. For each pattern, the number of folders with at least one item matching the pattern is shown, and selecting a pattern will show the list of folders that have those matching items.

Ignore Case