Caution with Remove-PublicFolder cmdlet

Today I had ran into some trouble at a client with the Remove-PublicFolder cmdlet in Exchange 2010.  The Remove-PublicFolder cmdlet by default removes a public folder from all public folder databases within an Exchange organisation.

This example removes a public folder called "My Public Folder" from all public folder databases in an Exchange environment.

 Remove-PublicFolder -Identity "\My Public Folder"

If you want to remove "My Public Folder" on a specific Exchange server, you can do this with the following command:

Remove-PublicFolder -Identity "\My Public Folder" -Server Server01

If I want to list all public folders on a particular server I can do this with the following command:

Get-PublicFolder -Server Server01 -Recurse

Easy stuff right?  The problem I found however was with the following command:

Get-PublicFolder -Server Server01 -Recurse | Remove-PublicFolder

Here I piped the output of the Get-PublicFolder command to the Remove-PublicFolder command.

Get-PublicFolder -Server Server01 -Recurse displays a list of all public folders on Server01.  When piped into the Remove-PublicFolder command the Remove-PublicFolder command removes the public folders on all servers even though I only specified Server01.  The pipe between the commands does not have the logic to pipe through the server I selected in the Get command, something which other Exchange cmdlets do.  Definately a gotcha and something to watch out for.

To ensure this problem does not happen, you must specify which server you are removing public folders for on the Remove-PublicFolder cmdlet.  For example:

Remove-PublicFolder -Identity "\My Public Folder" -Server "My Server"

Hopefully this will avoid you restoring from backup as I found myself doing today.