Hi We are running Exchange 2003 SP2. Within our Mailbox Manager policy, we have a setting as below: Folder: Inbox Message age: 30 days+ Action: Delete Immediately I was wondering: i) When Exchange carries out the 'delete immediately' action on messages over 30 days, what actually happens to the message? Is it stored somewhere, or simply deleted? ii) If we changed the setting to "move to deleted items", I assume this would increase the users' overall mailbox size? iii) If we did this on a large scale (i.e. change setting from "delete immediately" to "move to deleted items") I assume we would have a significant increase to our database size? iv) Does the behaviour for the above change in Exchange 2007 or 2010?

On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:06:06 +0000, Pancamo wrote: >Hi We are running Exchange 2003 SP2. Within our Mailbox Manager policy, we have a setting as below: Folder: Inbox Message age: 30 days+ Action: Delete Immediately I was wondering: i) When Exchange carries out the 'delete immediately' action on messages over 30 days, what actually happens to the message? Is it stored somewhere, or simply deleted? The message is "hard deleted". >ii) If we changed the setting to "move to deleted items", I assume this would increase the users' overall mailbox size? No, it wouldn't increase the mailbox size. The mailbox size would remain the same. >iii) If we did this on a large scale (i.e. change setting from "delete immediately" to "move to deleted items") I assume we would have a significant increase to our database size? No, not at all. >iv) Does the behaviour for the above change in Exchange 2007 or 2010? The whole "mailbox manager" concept changes. The bottom line remains the same, though. Messages are either deleted, deleted with the possibility of recovering them, or deleted with no possibility of recovering them. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Hi Rich, Thanks for answering! Just to clarify the increase in size question... Let's say I have 1000 users on my Exchange server and currently we "delete immediately" all messages in the Inbox over 30 days. I then change this so that for messages older than 30 days they are "moved to Deleted Items folder" Deleted Items folder itself is set to "delete immediately" anything older than 7 days. We aren't going to change this. When we do make the change, overall, aren't the sizes of users' mailboxes going to increase over time? Because previously, items over 30 days were purged immediately, but now they are going to remain in the Deleted Items folder for an extra 7 days? So there will be - over time - a slight growth in their mailbox size?

On Thu, 1 Jul 2010 18:28:36 +0000, Pancamo wrote: >Just to clarify the increase in size question... Let's say I have 1000 users on my Exchange server and currently we "delete immediately" all messages in the Inbox over 30 days. Okay. The size of the mailbox is decreased. >I then change this so that for messages older than 30 days they are "moved to Deleted Items folder" There's no change in the size of the mailbox if you do that. All you did was move the messages from one folder to another. >Deleted Items folder itself is set to "delete immediately" anything older than 7 days. That would decrease the mailbox size by whatever amount of space was occupied by those messages in the "Deleted Items" folder that haven't been modified in the last seven days. >We aren't going to change this. When we do make the change, overall, aren't the sizes of users' mailboxes going to increase over time? Your original quest was whether moving the messages to the deleted items folder would increase the size of the mailbox. The answer is still no . . . >Because previously, items over 30 days were purged immediately, but now they are going to remain in the Deleted Items folder for an extra 7 days? .. . . but this wasn't asked in your original question. :-) >So there will be - over time - a slight growth in their mailbox size? Over the initial seven days, yes. After that, no. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP