Hello,I recently had an issue where I exceeded the max size of the Exchange 2003 database. I expanded the maximum database size by following an MS technet article as an immediate fix, but now I'm on to slimming down the database size.I deleted a whole bunch of large emails from user's mailboxes, and about 80,000 emails and NDRs from the admin account (don't ask). The thing is, the database size doesn't seem to be going down, even though these large emails are no longer in any of the accounts...In the Exchange System Manager, I am looking at Servers>My Server>First Storage Group>Mailbox Store>Mailboxes . I'm refreshing this list after deleting large items out of user's mailboxes, but the user mailbox size in this list NEVER goes down! What the deally?Thanks!

The actual size of the mailboxes in ESM should go down after messages are emptied from the Deleted Items folders. The data in the database will not be cleared out for some time after that, though. Probably 7 days depending on your deleted item recovery time. However, the database file size never shrinks. It will just have white space in it. Look for Event ID 1221 in your application event log, that will give you a rough idea of who much white space is in each database. You can shrink the database size, but you must use ESEUTIL /D to do that.