Hi, We have exchange 2003 server with large size mail box residing on server. Now we are archiving the mails thru outlook & creating pst file on local machine. But we found that after archiving themails still mail box sizeon mail store is not chaning (not getting reducing). Can some tell me what could be the reason? Thanks in advance. Varian Crasto

Is the number of items in the mailbox being reduced when you archive? If the number of items is only being reduced a little, then you probably aren't going to get much space back with the current archiving parameters. Also It's possible that it's a small amount of messages in the mailbox have large attachments, and they are taking up the bulk of the mail storage. Archiving off old messages wouldn't necessarily fix that if those few large messages were new (and didn't fit in with the archiving parameters you were inputting). You can use Outlook to tell you how big each folder is by right mouse clicking on the root of the mailbox, selecting properties, and then the Folder Size button. Once you see where the bulk of the storage is being taken up, you can then use Outlook to sort the view of that folder to show the largest messages. Also I have seen on a rare occasion that large system items can get stored in the root of the mailbox, like blackberry configuration information, and there isn't much you can do about that other than use a tool like MFCMAPI to go in and rip it out. However this is really rare and probably not what you are seeing. Good Luck!

Hi, Thanks for yourquick reply, As suggested by you we have already checked thru outlook & I can see that in outlook it shows reducedmailbox size in few MBs. buton server mail store it is still showing the original size in GBs. For few users I can see that mail store size has been reduced from 4GB to 1.5GB .... but for some users it still showing original sizefor example2.4GB after archive, while it shows 500MB in outlook. (Note : Archive has done on friday). Can you please let me know what could be the reason. Thanks & Regards Varian Crasto

Did you follow my recommendation to go to the subfolders showing the large amount of data and sort by message size? Again it could be something as simple as you telling the archive to move out anything older than 30 days, but the messages taking a large amount of storage are newer than 30 days.

Have you tried a defrag of the db on Exchange. Refer to this article for assistance http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804

Defragmenting the database file will not modify how Exchange reports back the size of the individual mailboxes inside of it.

I had been running into an issue almost exactly like this one for a while now. After I discovered that I had a user with a 68MB mailbox that was being reported by ESM as 1.8GB (!), I HAD to figure this out. It should also be notedthat I wasunable to move a mailbox into this store that I hadearliermoved out of it (it had experienced the same problems). Upon further inspection of the event logs after a restart of the ExchangeIS, I found numerous Event ID 1240 warnings indicating various missing registry entries. That led me to this TechNet articlethat describes the cause and fix for the problem.I then: Addedthe "Background Cleanup" and "Track Duplicates" registry entries (among others) for each store. Restarted the Exchange services. Forced the Background Cleanup Agent to run on the affected mail store. Happily noted a 1.7GB drop in mailbox size a short time later. Hope this helps!

Absolutely there will be a difference between mailbox size in Outlook & ESM. Reason is Exchange Store has dumpster i.e., rentention of deleted items. This dumpster get's purged during the Online Maintenance Interval ran daily by store at a schedule time. Please refer Jermey Kelly's blog on Online Maintenance Interval and about this tasks it runs: http://blogs.msdn.com/jeremyk/archive/2004/06/12/154283.aspx Hope this helps you a lot.