I kept getting a permissions error in my Exmerge.log file:

'Verify that the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service is running and that you have the correct permissions to log on. (0x8004011d)'

This is one of those annoying ‘exchange being oversecure for no good reason moments’, basically the administrator user (under which you are probably logged on for such an exercise) is denied permission to access individual mailboxes.

I found a couple of MS documents on the subject:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322312

and,

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996410.aspx

Neither of them unfortunately resolved the problem in my case. It appears that even adding the administrator user to a temporary windows ‘exchange recovery’ group still didn’t allow access to the mailbox for extraction.

The solution is to:

1. Create a new Active Directory Group called ‘Exchange ExMerge’ (or whatever you like).
2. Give the new group full permissions on the store as per the 2nd MS article above.
3. Create a new user and add it to the Exchange ExMerge group and Domain Admins.
4. Logon to the Exchange server as the new user, run Exmerge and it should finally work.

You could of course just create the user and give it the appropriate permissions but I was just being ‘proper’!