Hi Everyone,I have searched intensively for an appropriate solution to this issue but cannot find one. We have a customer who is running Exchange 2003 Standard edition. Database sizes are as follows:priv1.edb - 35.6GBpriv1.stm - 37.7GBThis is abviously a problem as they are about to hit the 75GB limit meaning the store will automatcially dismount. I fully understand how the stm files is used and by what type of clients but we need to reduce the size without affecting user data. unfortunately I cannot move these mailboxes to another store as Standard edition does not support multiple storage groups. Can anyone offer some other advice on reducing the size of the stm fileother than upgrading to Enterprise edition? All necessary data has been deleted and a whitespace check on the stm shows only 80MB will be freed after an offline defrag. previous offline defrag freed up nect to nothing.Many thanksAlistair

Hi, First I think we may change the deleted item retention and mailbox retention to minimum value and then perform a online maintenance to release these deleted item space. After that, we can perform a offline maintenance to defrag the space. We need to go to the registry key and change the schedule of online maintenance task, set the retention period to Zero. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<ServerName>\Private-<Public Folder GUID> Value NameOLD Minimum RunTime. RadixREG_DWORD. DescriptionThe amount of time to run after completing at least one of the Exchange store maintenance tasks in minutes. Default value is 15 minutes. Value NameOLD Completion Time. RadixREG_DWORD. DescriptionThe amount of time in seconds beyond the maintenance window that online defragmentation will be allowed to run. Default value is 1 hour or 3,600 seconds. How to resolve unexpected growth of EDB or/and STM Fileshttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/555360/en-us How to defragment Exchange databaseshttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804/en-us 10 Tips to Optimize Exchange 2003 Performance (Part 2) http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Optimize-Exchange-2003-Performance-Part2.html Regards, Xiu