My company's domain consists of Windows 2000 in native mode and Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 4 (SP4) in mixed mode. Sometimes our users accidentally delete a public folder that they want to restore. In the past, I've used Microsoft Office Outlook 2002's and Outlook 2000's Recover Deleted Items wizards to recover these folders. (For information about this method, see the Microsoft article "XADM: How to Recover Items That Are Not First Transferred to the Deleted Items Folder" at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=178630.) However, the feature doesn't always work. Several times, I've received the error message that Figure 1 shows.
I contacted Microsoft for help with this problem, to no avail. My only alternative seemed to be to create a recovery server and restore the Exchange database to that server. (For information about this method, see the "Exchange 2000 Alternate Server Recovery Overview" section in the "Exchange 2000 Server Database Recovery" white paper at http://support.microsoft.com/support/exch2000/whitepapers/e2kdbrecovery.doc.)
Then, I remembered that you can use Exchange 2000 Outlook Web Access's (OWA's) Options (on the Shortcut bar) to recover deleted items. I clicked View Items in the Recover Deleted Items section and looked at the URL that was associated with the deleted items to see what parameters the URL was using. The URL was using the parameter http://servername/exchange/username/Deleted%20Items/?cmd=showdeleted&btnClose=1. I used this syntax to try to open the public folder from which the user deleted the folder (i.e., http://servername/public/toplevel/subfolder/?cmd=showdeleted&btnClose=1). I found the folder the user wanted to recover, highlighted the folder, and clicked Recover. The folder was restored, and I didn't receive an error message as I had when I used Outlook's Recover Deleted Items wizard.
I prefer the OWA method to the Outlook method for recovering a deleted folder because Outlook adds the text (Recovered) to the name of folders you recover, as well as to the email addresses assigned to these folders. The OWA method doesn't add this unnecessary text.