Public folders are no longer mail-enabled via the graphical interface of the Exchange Management Console in Exchange 2007. This task, as well as many others, are carried out using the Exchange Management Shell command-line interface (CLI). I had to perform this task last week and had to look up the steps beforehand. I am adding them here for future reference but hope this post is of value to others as well.

The first step is to verify that the public folder that you want to mail-enable has not already been enabled. This is accomplished with the Get-MailPublicFolder cmdlet. The syntax is as follows:

Get-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName”

Next you need to disable the Email Address Policy for the public folder (the same as unchecking the Automatically update email addresses based on email address policy in the Exchange Management Console). This task is accomplished using the Set-MailPublicFolder cmdlet as follows:

Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName” -EmailAddressPolicyEnabled:$FALSE

Once you have confirmed that the public folder is not already mail-enabled and have excluded the folder from the Email Address Policy, you mail-enable the folder with the Enable-MailPublicFolder cmdlet:

Enable-MailPublicFolder -Identity “\YourPublicFolderName”

Now you are ready to assign the email address(es) to the public folder.  Again, we use the Set-MailPublicFolder cmdlet:

Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName” -EmailAddresses address1@contoso.com,address2@contoso.com,address3@contoso.com

The first address listed in the above cmdlet is automatically designated as the Primary SMTP address for the folder. If needed, you can change the primary address as follows:

Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName” -PrimarySmtpAddress PrimaryAddress@contoso.com