Hello. I am the part-time administrator of an SBS 2003 network protected with Symantec Anti-Virus Corp. Ed. for SBS, v. 10.1.X.XWe have ten users. We use Outlook 2003 as the email client. The alert threshold in Exchange is set to 200 mb. Recently a user started to get warning messages that his mailbox exceeded the threshold. Looking at the mailbox, it does show it is about 208mb. However, the items in the inbox and sent items folders cannot account for this.He had explosive growth in one day. On November 20th his mailbox was 34mb. On November 21st is exploded to204mb, literally overnight. (This is based on the report that SBS generates for me everyday. It has remained high since.All users are on auto-archive, which runs automatically daily. The archives are stored on their local computers.This user's archive folders have several hundred items. His 'live' mailbox has about 10 unread items as of this morning and about 50 items total. Sent items has about 50 items.In mailbox management the size report is about 185mb local and 208mb server.I am at a loss to understand why he has such a huge mailbox. Even with a few attrachements, his mailbox should not be over 40mb.I have checked his auto-archive settings. I have looked at him on the Exchange server and I am baffled.Short of calling MS tech support, can anyone give me some ideas where I could look for a solution.There is one other user who has similar issues. He went from 80mb to 150mb overnight. Since then his mailbox has returned to normal size.

Can you go to Exchange System Manager on the SBS Server and verify how many items and and how large the users mailbox actually is?It will be under the ServerName-First Storage Group-Mailboxes. I would also suggest increasing your limit per mailbox as 200MB is not that much now a days and keeping archives on the personal hard drives will not protect them if the local computer crashes. Exchange 2003 SP2 can have a Private Mailbox Store Limit of 73GB which should be plenty for 10 Users and all Mailbox data is backed up once they start storing all mail in Exchange Mailbox. You can also set Mailbox Manager Policies to force cleanup of mailboxes if mailboxes become to large.MVP Exchange Server

Mr. Oliver, thanks for responding.I did as you asked and report the following information.The user with theproblem as of 9:15 this morning (Central Time): Size: 225.4mb and6,074 itemsThe other user who had seen explosive growth and then things calmed down: Size:151.1mb and6,346 items Typical other users:-My mailbox, for example: Size: 47.3mb with6,348 items-User Karen's mailbox: Size:65.7mb with 6,961 itemsI have increased mailbox size to 500 mb which should give me some time to figure this out.All user's PC's hard drives backup weekly across the network to a backup server so they might lose a week's worth of archiving.I would welcome any suggestions to troubleshoot this.Thanks so much.

Hello,Did you do some preliminary examinations on the mailbox by opening it in outlook? - Right click on top of mailbox Mailbox UserName and click properties, general tab, Folder Size which should be almost similar to mailbox size seems in ESM. Size (without subfolders) shows 0kb which is root of the mailbox.- Right click on top of mailbox Mailbox UserName, click on Advance Find and dont select any field & click on Find Now which searches all theavailable mails in mailbox, now click on Size field which sorts mail according to the size and then check the messages which are really big in size, where are they coming from, when they came etc to find out the kind of growth factor.- Sometime some bigger mails stuck in sync folders also if outlook profile is configured in Cache Mode, you may verify that too. Amit Tank || MVP - Exchange || MCITP - Exchange 2007 || http://ExchangeShare.WordPress.com

Hi Mr. Tank,I did as you suggested and can report the following: The properties under the Mailbox User reports a size of 200.8mb. This is less than the server's reported value by about 10%.I did the advanced search and size sort and found the largest file is 462kb. I looked at the files around Nov. 19-22 and did not find anything unusual. Most were 15-20kb or less.Exchange runs in cached mode. I assumed (since I don't know if I understand what I am looking for) that I should look at the 'Sync Issues'' folders in the Outlook folder tree on his workstation. That folder is empty.Thank you for taking the time to try and help us (me). This is maddening!Tomas

Can you please verify you have the latest Office 2003 Service Pack on the clients? I would also run Exchange Best Practice Analyzer and SBS Best Practice Analyzer to insure everything it patched and it finds no issues. I have seen this issue but in your case it would not be relevant since your OL Clients are in Cached Mode,http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908507MVP Exchange Server

How big is "Sent Items"?