The other day i set an email managed default folder policy under deleted items, junk email and our spam folder.. i set the policy to handle all mail content and set it to 30 days.. i then set a policy in the policy tab and chose those folders.. actually.. yesterday i had only added "junk email" and "spam" in the policy.. those two are set to move emails into the deleted items folder.. I set this policy using the shell script yesterday afternoon, this morning.. all users reported only having emails from around 9/8 onward.. There were a few subfolders from my mailbox with emails dated around 9/8, in the deleted items, but nothing more.. I would have thought if these policies blew up.. they would have only stuck stuff in the deleted items folder and not made them go poof.. Even more odd.. our database size is 27gb.. this is what it was yesterday, so its like nothing was "really" deleted. Even the MS tech is unsure what has gone wrong.. I assumed it was this retention policy, but i'm baffled... Any help / thoughts out there? (in the meantime, a restoration is underway from an ntbackup, thankfully)..

The DB does not shrink if data is deleted! (only after offline defrag) Testing is everything before you apply to production. I don't think I can help you Deli

Even weirder is that some people had all the deleted subfolder items in their deleted items folder, while others had their emails prior to 9/9 just go poof.

Deli Pro-Exchange wrote: The DB does not shrink if data is deleted! (only after offline defrag) Testing is everything before you apply to production. I don't think I can help you Deli Does anyone recall the way to do this offline defrag for 2007? Is it still the same as 2003? Eseutil /? after dismounting? **My problem occurred, because i created a new managed default folder called spam.. which got applied to the entire mailbox, because you cant do this in this section, in fact, microsoft claims that under the manage custom folders (not the default one).. that you cant just add the folder to set a retention policy there either (?).. seems like i should be able to set a retention policy on a subfolder if i want to though.

Offline defrag: Dismount database,run "eseutil /mh foo.edb" to check header for a clean shutdown, run "eseutil /d foo.edb" to defrag database.