I've been looking for this all over and I cannot believe that there isn't a tutorial on how to recover all sent and received messages on an exchange server (NOT just a recovery of someones mailbox from a recent checkpoint). So, since I can't find any postings, I'm creating one.

My situation: I have an exchange 2007 server that's been up and running for less then a year. Now, it appears that someone who's left the company has gone and deleted important e-mails from their past that we now need in order to know what we promised to who. It's too far back to just use the outlook recover option that brings up everything deleted 7-10 days ago and we have 0 backups.

What I've tried: I've been tinkering with using transaction logs and eseutil in order to replay them all to a temporary 2nd exchange server I would then log into the temp server via outlook, but I can't seem to get it right. I created an env file by recovering our current state from the live server to the temporary server using windows backup and have been able to edit the transaction log range the env file uses by editing the env file in a hex editor. However, I have not been able to get this to run. I keep running into obscure errors. The newest error is "Existing log file is not contiguous." despite the fact that I put every single transaction log in that folder with the env file and only set the range to 4207-4210. It doesn't run with only these 10 transaction logs in there either. I run eseutil /CC in the folder the restore.env file resides and the databases are dismounted and "This database can be overwritten by a restore" is checked.

I'd also entertain the possibility of recovering to a checkpoint at a time, logging in as that person, exporting the data, then recovering to the next checkpoint, and repeat but I cannot find anything on recovering to an older checkpoint either.