HI,I have one question as where on exchange serverican find that what is retention period of any mail box, secondly, once data is deleted to gain free space on server how can we physically check it,can it automatically be shown as extra space (free) or we have tofollow some procedure,guide me ,thanks moreover, once data is moved to archieve folder on client machines does it free space on server as i am in process of deleting and moving mails of my users to archive folder on local disk to gain space ,so this wold help us to get freespace on server,thanks.

Hi, 1. Check Deletion Settings in below article, you can see Keep deleted items for (days) which is retention period for that mailbox database and all the mailboxes inside it. Deleted Item Recovery and Deleted Mailbox Recovery http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF022.html 2. Once you delete or archive the mails from inbox/sent items on client machine, those mails will stay in dumpster for the number of days mentioned in step 1 3. Once the dumpster days are over, after you delete or archive mails, it will clean up the space in Exchange database but it does NOT clear the space on your hard drive. You can see cleaned space in Exchange database with event 1221 in application event log. 4. To reduce the size of Exchange database and clean some space (approximet amount offree spaceyou can check in event id 1221) on your hard drive you need to perform offline defragmentation. For offline defragmentation you can follow below article. How to defragment Exchange databases http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804