MSFT Exchange 2003 SBS. Problem - My information store is HUGE. I had a user with a 50 GB mailbox size, which i reduced down to 800meg. When I ran a eseutil /d option on it, the information store did NOT decrease. Right now, my database file is 79gig in size. Here are my mailbox sizes: 14 GB 885 Meg 530 Meg 294 Meg 173 Meg 134 Meg 110 Meg 103 Meg 77 Meg 68 Meg 46 Meg 45 Meg 30 Meg 28 Meg 5 Meg 4 Meg As you can see, nowhere close to 79 gig. Note - when i deleted all of those items, the Deletion Settings were set to 30 days. I have since changed it to ZERO and have run a full backup. Now, when I run a eseutil /ms, i get the following free: TOTALS: Free: 72755 Reserved: 206 Deleted: 266 Committed: 56309 Unknown: 0 ------------- 129536 This is 72 meg free, right?Any thoughts on how i can get this IS down to the appropriate size? THANKS!

Hi Brian, You will have to wait to run online-maintenance which clears the space in database as a white space. You can see 1221 event in application event log with the amount of white space after completion of online-maintenance. You can claim that amount of size reduction when you do offline defragmentation later. Reference: Is offline defragmentation considered regular Exchange maintenance?

Hi Brian, ++++++++++ Free:72755 ++++++++++ Firstly, the above information means that there are 72755 free pages in the database file, and each page is 4096 bytes in length. Thus, there are approximate 290 MB of empty space in the file. You will recover 290 MB after you do the offline defrag from the database file. In addition, please understand that when emails are deleted from Deleted Item folder, it will be placed in Dumpster. Emails in the Dumpster obey the retention time setting. You can check the setting through Information Store->Limits->Keep deleted items for (days). The default setting is 7 days. Online defragment will retrieve database space from data in the dumpster that has already passed the retention date. That is to say, by default, deleted emails are kept in dumpster for 7 days. 7 days after the deletion, the next online defragment will mark the space occupied by these emails in the dumpster as Free. And only after that online defragment is completed, the next offline defragment will retrieve the disk space online maintenance has marked as Free. Thus, please check whether the retention time setting is appropriate and whether online defragment is performed before the offline defragment. Mike

Also keep in mind that Exchange is a single-instance-store database, where every sender and recipient of a specific item must delete it before anything is actually removed from the database. If a user sends a 10MB attachment to 30 people and everyone of them deletes the message, but the original server leaves it in their Sent Items, that 10MB file will still be stored in the ESM database. Because of this design, Exchange is very efficient with how it grows, but makes it very hard to reclaim large amounts of space. So don't be surprised if you delete/move a 2GB mailbox from the store and only see 500MB of space reclaimed, for example. the percentage really depends on your communities messaging behavior.