How to use dynamic dates in a Search-Mailbox query? - powershell

Question

I have this PowerShell snippet to delete e-mail between 2 dates:
Search-Mailbox -Identity <username> -SearchQuery '(Received:09/20/2012..10/12/2012)' -deletecontent
I want to make it dynamic so that it deletes e-mail older than 6 months. How can I calculate the date of 6 months ago to use in this snippet?
I have tried:
$date = (Get-Date).AddMonths(-6)
Search-Mailbox -Identity Sales -SearchQuery '(Received:<$date)' -DeleteContent
but it shows the error message:
The property keyword isn't supported.

Answer 1

$date is a System.DateTime object. When converted to a string it will show both date and time information which is dependent on your regional settings. This is what mine looks like:
PS M:\Scripts> $date = (Get-Date).AddMonths(-6)
PS M:\Scripts> $date
Sunday, March 27, 2016 9:30:20 AM
PS M:\Scripts> "$date"
03/27/2016 09:30:20
That last line does not meet the standards required by KQL (Keyword Query Language)
YYYY-MM-DD
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssfrZ
Since you just want the date portion lets just get that.
(Get-Date).AddMonths(-6).ToShortDateString()
3/27/2016
While that does not use hyphens, in my case, it appears the syntax allows for it in your test cases. There are oodles of ways to format dates in PowerShell. Here is one that conforms to the syntax in TechNet
(Get-Date).AddMonths(-6).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")
2016-03-27
Point is you have to do something that will satisfy your query syntax. Test some string without -deletecontent first or just write the string to console to see what it looks like.
For a span of time you would use one of the above suggestions and, assuming you save those string results in variables, it would look something like this:
-SearchQuery '(Received:$fromDate..$toDate)'