Hi, I would like to clarify some things about the Global Policy on Exchange 2003.When creating a global policy the value is <not set> I have been told that leaving <not set> in some situations the global policy will not successfully clean the mails that match the policy. The recommendation in order to successfully get the results from the policy is to change the <not set> to value to 2 if we want to stay with the default configuration. According to MS KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804 When you set a value of 2, you can expect the following behavior:"You can safely ignore the submitted date property on messages and delete messages whose delivery and modified date property exceed the age limit that is set by the policy setting."If we setup value 2 the Global Policy takes in consideration the "modify date" so if a user opens (modifies) the email the message counter will go back to day 0 and emails will not be deleted. 2.) Also we have found that the mailboxes for some of the users are pretty big in size specially considering the type of global policy we have in place. I have been told that even though the policy does clean the emails from the mailboxes the size of the mailbox will not be decreased since in order to do that we have to do an offline defrag of the database. So If we global policy deletes 300MB worth of emails Jill Emery mailbox the size of the mailbox will not reduced until we run an offline defrag of the database. 3.) Finally I have been also told that is not recommended to setup purge of Calendar and Tasks via Global Policy since it could cause the deletion of calendars tasks that have a recurrence setup and run into other issues. Could someone verify if those statements are true.Thank you.

Hi, The first description is true. In Exchange 2000/2003, in order for a message to be processed by a policy, the age of the message must pass 3 criteria: Delivery: (PR_MESSAGE_DELIVERY_TIME), Sent: (PR_CLIENT_SUBMIT_TIME), and Last Modified: (PR_LAST_MODIFICATION_TIME). If any of these flags are less than the age specified on the mailbox manager policy settings, that message will not be processed. In other words, if you have a policy set to 30 days and at 29 days a user reads a message that falls under this policy (and hence sets the last modified flag back to 0 days) the message will not be processed after the 30th day because it will fail on 1 of the 3 criteria. It will not be processed until all the criteria are met For the second point, that is false. The Mailbox Manager feature can reduce the mailbox sieze. The key point is you need to configure Deleted item retention for the mailbox to combine the Mailbox Manager feature to decrease the mailbox size. The Offline Defragmentation is used for mailbox database. For the third point, that is true. Mailbox Manager does not ever delete recurring appointments or tasks, regardless of age. Thanks Allen

Hi Allen, Thank for your reply. In regards to the second point. We use Recipient Policies to clean the mailboxes (inbox=30days, deleted items=7days and so on..) so the mailboxes are being purged. You said that the key point is to configure Deleted item retention for the mailbox to combine the Mailbox Manager feature to decrease the mailbox size. Can you please give me some direction on how to accomplish that or point me out to an article that goes over this approach? So basically if I go ahead and delete all the emails on a mailbox or a recepient policy does it the mailbox size will be reduced? Am I understading that right? So if I check the EMC console I should be able to see that the size of the mailbox went down for example from 300MB to 20MB. Thank you.

Hi, Yes, you are on the right way when using the recepient policy to reduce the mailbox size. Please understand that the content of the Deleted Items folder is included in the size of the mailbox. Thus, you need to set the Recipient Policy to delete the items under Deleted Items folder. After that, there is no neccessary to set the Deleted Item retention on the mailbox. Thanks Allen