I have an Exchange 2003 server with Service Pack 2 loaded and has all the current patches loaded. The other day the store went offline with the error of the Store had hit the 18GB limit. I restarted the store and deleted a ton of email and then ran an offline defrag of the store using the eseutil.exe utility. The database size dropped by about 1GB but I was still gettting warnings in the application log. I exported the email box list from system manager to excel and totalled the emailbox sizes and it only comes to just under 8GB. What is hidden in the store taking up the additional 10GB of space and what can I do to purge it or view it? As a stop gap I have increased the store limit to 24GB but I want to find out what is going on before it comes back to bite me. Thanks Victor

I found that I had a large amount of email in Deleted Item Retention which I have deleted. Is there another way to compact the database without taking it offline or to get a true showing of how much of the store is actually in use?