What are Public folders in Exchange and what are the different types?
Exchange Public folders enable an organization's team members to share email and information. They can be mail enabled and include features such as contacts, calendars, messages, and journal entries, among others. Public folders can be viewed in the Exchange admin center or when configuring your Outlook email account. Exporting Exchange Public folders is required in a variety of situations, such as when your company decides to switch to Office 365 or when emails must be backed up for compliance. Another important fact is that when organizations migrate from, say, Exchange 2010 to 2019, they must export Public folders along with mailboxes to a suitable format such as PST for storage and archiving. Pub1.edb was a dedicated database file for public folders in Exchange 2000 and 2003. This was replaced in 2007 with a Public folder database, and from Exchange 2013 onwards, the concept of a separate database for the Public folder was dropped, with the Public folder being integrated with the main mailbox database. In the latest versions of Exchange the Public folder data is contained in the EDB file, and accessing or exporting the contents requires opening the EDB. It is also important to understand that the database file can only be mounted on an Exchange server or opened using dedicated third-party tools like EdbMails. In this article, we look at how to export the Exchange Public folder to PST.
