I am running SBS 2003 SP2, with standard Mailbox size limit. I am now getting a warning about the Store nearing it's limit. Tried so far: Users have deleted around 40,000 emails between them or more (I know they should have had limits before now). I have set the Retention settings for deleted items to 0. Done and Offline Defrag, and left it over weekend, for normal maintenance to occur. This has only reduced the .edb file and .stm files by 1gb between them. I can't see any way to get these files down and remove the warning. I know the deletions will have have created white space to be filled, but I have no way of monitoring the actual size unless the database reflects the true position. Any more suggestions welcome?

Frances, Have you verified just how much white space is in the database files before performing the offline defragmentation? Since Exchange uses a single-instance store it can be quite difficult to reduce the database size as many times most users will delete a specific message and/or attachment, but if any single mailbox still contains that same data it will not be removed from the database. Archiving and purging old mailboxes is one way to help remove that last final copy of data if all active users are cleaning up their items. Take a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q195914/ for info on the 1221 event log and using the ESEUTIL to identify the amount of white-space.