One of my clients is running out of space in their Exchange 2003 information store, they are using 67GB of 75GB allowed by standard. A reveied of the mailbox sizes in ESM indicates that a total of 38 GB is used by the mailboxes. I have added the Deleted Items column to ESM and it indicates there is 29GB total of deleted items. Deleted item retention is set to 1 Day. The cleanup is scheduled to run from 6a-9am and appears to complete successfully. Exchange is NOT configured to require a full backup before permanently deleting, but the backups are completing normally. Additionally, Exchange reports that a full backup was run last night. Any suggestions?

I would suggest that you have a closer look on the user accounts as it is possible to change the retenion value on per user basis. Open user account in the Active Directory and check "Exchange General" -> "Storage limits" and there the setting for "Keep deleted items for X days". This setting overrides the setting for the store. On the other hand, clearing deleted items will not automatically reduce the size of the Exchange database so that additional reducing of the white space using ESEUtil will be necessary. See also here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804 Have a good luck Eduard

I will not suggest you to go with eseutil /d command for doing offline defragmentation to make free space. You can create one new databse and move all mailbox into this databse and delete old one. Did you see event id 1221 for white space which just generate right after online maintenance.Anil MCC 2011,ITIL V3,MCSA 2003,MCTS 2010, My Blog : http://messagingschool.wordpress.com

Correct Exchange 2003 std. can only haev one mailbox database and one PF database. so you cannot create a new DB and move mailboxes. How much free space do event id 1221 say? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/186291 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555323 if you can generate more free space (you obviously are trying), DB file size would not increase. what you can do is to create a new server and move mailboxes to it. Then do an offline defrag on the overgrown DB which should shrink it down to a small size and then move mailboxes back. this is of course good as long as users not taking up space to get the DB oversize again. You can also upgrade to Ent. version of Exchange which will give you much larger and also multiple DB's You can always work a little harder and upgrade Exchange to 2010, this will also give you large and multiple DB support and of course all the nice features of Exchange 2010 compared to Exchange 2003. lasse at humandata dot se, http://anewmessagehasarrived.blogspot.com

There are some problems in this scenario. 1. As we know, the server is running out of space. If you create a new mailbox store and move all mailboxes into it, you will need a lot of free space to able to host both mailbox databases simultaneously before you are able to delete the old one. Both cases need a lot of free space, but defrag parameters let you keep temporary file on a mapped network drive. 2. As I understand, the client deploys standard version of Exchange Server 2003 and this means that there are only “One mailbox store database and one public folder store database that can be accessed by using MAPI and Outlook Web Access” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822440 As this is probably the first mailbox store on the server it could be tricky to delete it because of the System Attendant mailbox which cannot be moved using usual procedure. As far as I know there are no documented methods to move System Attendant mailbox to another location. There are some suggestions to use ADSIEdit tools, but I would not risk to do so in the productive environment. According to this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821829 - The Move Mailbox feature in Exchange Server 2003 helps to prevent the accidental movement of system mailboxes. If you try to move the System Attendant mailbox, you receive the following error message: Not available for exchangeAdminService objects If you try to move a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mailbox, you receive the following error message: Not available for mailGateway objects If you try to move a system mailbox, you receive the following error message: This is a System Mailbox and it cannot be moved.