EXMerge is your friend

ExMerge is a great tool....when it works....I used it to migrate from a POP3 environment to a brand new Exchange 2003 environment this past january. Well, for reasons that no one can explain or seem to be recorded anywhere on the net, when importing with ExMerge all the mail apears to come over, but a few messages in each mailbox are what I'll call corrupt. They show up in the folder listing but can't be opened in either the preview pane or by double-clicking them. What is the big deal you ask? Well, first of all the problem didn't come to light until we'd migrated all 150 users since no one goes back and checks ALL of their old mail to make sure it will open and remember, the messages appear to be there in the folder list. Second, lots of tools don't work when you have corrupt messages in your mailbox--think "archive" and more importantly offline-access. I'm a huge fan of Exmerge but it screwed me pretty hard on this migration. I'm still finding mailboxes with corrupt messages and then only thing to do is delete the offending message and then go get it off the original PST and put it in the user's mailbox directly. Before you ask, the wonderful dublicate thing does not work to fix this issue. In fact, after much testing i came to discover that it generally corrupts the same messages on import, but there is no pattern as why particular messages get corrupted while others do not. I also tryed "repairing" the PSTs before I imported them but that too made no difference. So, before you rest your entire migration strategy on a single tool like I did, be darn sure that you check more than just the fact that messages show up in the folder list....just my $.02