Description

In legacy versions of Exchange, we saw the Internet Newsgroup public folder. This was intended to be used for a local NNTP source, where an org could have a local copy of some select newsgroups for their users to view. The feature never really went anywhere, and is now deprecated. But, if you’ve migrated from a legacy version of Exchange to Exchange 2007, the Internet Newsgroup is still there, as seen below. I see a lot of people asking how to just delete the public folder once and for all.

According to Microsoft, there is no supported method in Exchange 2007 for deleting that public folder. Some people have used ADSIEDIT to remove it, but that’s got the potential for disaster. The alternative is to hide it so it’s no longer visible. In this article, I’ll show you how.

Fire up good ol’ Exchange Manager Shell and type

Get-PublicFolderClientPermission -Identity "\Internet Newsgroups" | Format-List

As seen below (click images for larger versions), this shows us a list of all permissions for the PF. By default, you should see permissions for two ‘users’, Default and Anonymous. Default are permissions for Active Directory authenticated users, and Anonymous is for unauthenticated users. We need to remove the permissions for Default.

In my example, Default has ReadItems, CreateItems, EditOwnedItems, and FolderVisible rights. We can’t just remove FolderVisible (that would make too much sense) since that’s a built in right that comes with some of the others. So we’ll remove them all by using:

Remove-PublicFolderClientPermission -identity "\Internet Newsgroups" -User Default -AccessRights ReadItems, CreateItems, EditOwnedItems, FolderVisible

Once you hit enter, you should be prompted to confirm the operation, and then the rights should be removed, as seen below.

An important note is to leave a space between each right, and to only specify the rights that Default already has. Otherwise, you get an error, like the one seen below.

Once the rights are removed, the Internet Newsgroups public folder will quickly disappear from Outlook, as shown below.

While deleting the public folder may be preferred, hiding it from the list accomplishes the same end result as far as the user experience is concerned. This leaves a cleaner public folder hierarchy.

Donations

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