I was working on decommissioning an exchange 03 server. I moved all of the users off but then got hung up on something (not exchange related) which forced me to hold off uninstalling exchange. In the mean time to save on backups I dismounted the store and removed the stm, edb, and log files then remounted the stores. All was well for over a month. Last night a user ran a job to send out a mass mailing using a non-outlook client and they were pointing to the server I mentioned above. This morning the stm file on that server is over 3GB. I have verified that db maintneance ran and it is reporting that only 12MB of free space exists. My question is why is that file 3GB? Why would it hold onto that data? Short of dismounting the stores again is there any way to get that file down in size? Exchange 2003 SP2 Thanks

Make sure that you have excluded Exchange files from file level antivirus scanning. References: How to resolve unexpected growth of EDB or/and STM Files Recommendations for troubleshooting an Exchange Server computer with antivirus software installed You may think about re-creation of just STM file. How to re-create STM File in Exchange 2000/2003 The only way to decrease size of STM file is to do the offline defragmentation but it can claim the amount of white space shows in online defragmentation report (event id 1221).