0x8004011d -  Error opening message store (MSEMS). Verify that the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service is running and that you have the correct permissions to log on.

This error happens because you don’t have permission to access the mailboxes to back up to a .pst file.   By default no users have access, including the system Administrator.

This article is going to describe how to create a new user and group, with the correct permissions to use exmerge.exe to extract mailboxes from exchange into a .pst file. 

For the following you will need:

          Access to the mail server and domain controller to change Active Directory Users & Computers

-

Step 1: On a domain controller open up Active Directory Users & computers

Step 2: In  OU of your choice create a Global Security Group.

Step 3:


Create a new user associated only for mailbox extraction.  For this example we used the user exmerge.

Step 4:  Open the properties of the new user and open the member of tab and click Add

-          Add the following

-          New group you created, we used Exmerge

-          Schema Admins

-          Domain Admins

Then click OK & Close Active Directory Users & Computers

Step 5:

Open System Manager and Expand:

-          Administrative Groups

-          Servers

-          Mailserver name (ours is Mail)

-          First Storage Group

Then right click on Mailbox Store and click on properties

Step 6:

Click on the security tab and click Add

Step 7:

Enter the group you just created, we used Exmerge.  Then click OK

Step 8:

Change your groups Permissions and check Full Control.  Then click Apply and OK and close system manager

Step 9:

Now right click on exmerge.exe and left click on run as

Step 10: enter the username and password for the newly created user.  We used exmerge

You will now have opened exmerge.exe with the user who now has correct permissions to extract mailboxes or do whatever is needed.

And you will notice that the log will no longer be displaying 0x8004011d errors and exmerge will run successfully