We have set up a Journaling Database on our Exchange 2007 server with one email account as a member of this storage group. This account essentially takes a copy of every email sent in our organization and moves it to a second server. Once the email has been copied it is instantly deleted from this email account. However, when I go to look at the size of this database it is at 4.93GB. This just doesn't seem right if the database only contains one mailbox with nothing in it. And everday it seems to increase by an average of 50MB. I thought the size was related to white space so I tried a database defrag using eseutil but killed it once I saw that the new database size was still going to be too large.Any insight on why this is happening would be appreciated!Bryan

Hi,How is the mail item retention configured on this database (you could set it to 0 days) and also make sure that online maintenance is running and finishing at least once a week.Leif

Hi Leif,I set the "Keep deleted items" and "Keep deleted mailboxes" settings to 0 days last week, but this did not affect the size of the database. Also, online maintenance is set to run daily from 1:00am to 5:00am.Bryan

Setting"Keep deleted items" and "Keep deleted mailboxes" to 0 days doesn't decrease the size of database but can control the growth. Basic concept explained in below article on Database Disk size consumption, which might help you to understand the situation... Understanding Exchange Databases Disk Consumption http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Exchange-Databases-Disk-Consumption.html What's the amount event id 1221 shows? It shows the white space available in the database and offline defrag decrease aprox that amount from EDB file. Total EDB size = Current Size of Mailboxes + White Space (verify event id 1221) + Retention Items & Mailboxes (size of"Keep deleted items" and "Keep deleted mailboxes" in dumpster) So you can calculate the size based on this formula and see where it occupies space.Amit Tank | MVP Exchange Server | MCITP: EMA | MCSA: M | http://ExchangeShare.WordPress.com

Hi Amit,Thanks for pointing me to that article as it was very helpful. I went back and looked at the 1221 events and the most recent ones said there is just under 5GB of free space in the DB, which is exactly the amount ofspace that I am trying to free up. I went back a few dates and saw that the space freed up on the day I switched the Deleted Items retention from 14 days to 0 days. After this change the online defragmentation that ran the following night freed up the space. So now I will do an offline defrag tonight during after hours to reduce the database size.Thanks for your help!Bryan