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will4062

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Need more freespace on Exchange 2003 database

I have a server that's running Server 2003 Small Business Edition and Exchange 2003.  The users use exchange to store all their email.  Recently, we've been hitting the 75 gb mark and the database has been dismounted at 5:00 am.  I have told all the employees to start moving mail off exchange and onto their own computers, and all have obliged.  The problem is we're still at the 75gb limit, despite the fact people have moved tons of email off the server.  The actual sizes of the mailboxes comes nowhere close to 75gb.  I noticed on the "deleted Items" colomn in Exchange System Manager that some users have more than 20gb of deleted items.  I have set the retention policies to 1 day, so there's no reason exchange should be holding onto this mail.  However, this mail is apparently not being purged.  I need to free up space and fast, but nothing has worked so far.  I do an online defrag and backup daily, and I also have tried eseutil /p and an offline defrag. My whitespace still shows up as ~10mb.  
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Glen Knight
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Have a look here for setting retention periods: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF022.html

set them all to 0 and then modify the schedule so it runs every 15 minutes.

Get users to empty their deleted items folder as well
You can run eseutil /ms to check the whitespace or look for event 1221 in application logs
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996139%28EXCHG.65%29.aspx

Never run Eseutil /p (repair) it need to be run only when your database is corrupt and you don't have any backup to restore the old database
Ramifications of running the eseutil /p or edbutil /d /r command in Exchange
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/259851
You shouldn't be running eseutil /p to recover space this forces a repair on the database.

To defrag the database you need to run eseutil /d but this is nit required unless physical storage space is an issue.

The physical size of the edb file does not give an acurate picture of the logical size of the exchange database.
Ask users to empty deleted item folder once the folder is empty then you can run online defrag and you will see more white space.
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will4062

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I've gone through the retention settings already, and set both to 1.  The schedule to run is every day, but I still don't see the whitespace becoming available.  I also logged into the mailbox with the most deleted items and checked the deleted items folder.  The folder was empty.  
Set the retention to 0 for the sake of this excercise then restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store Service have a look at the link I posted make sure you got all the settings.
This could be due to currupted deleted items in the mailbox.i think you can use MFCmapi to delete such items.

How to delete corrupt mail items with MFCMAPI:
http://www.activedir.org/Articles/tabid/54/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/50/Default.aspx
How would I be able to tell what the corrupted message(s) are?  This particular user has ~20gb of email in her deleted items according to esm, however they don't appear via webmail or in entourage or Outlook.  
They are recoverable items.
Have you restarted the information store service since setting the retention period to 0?
you can delete the items from deleted items folder
I set the retention period to 0 for both deleted items and mailboxes and restarted the information store.  The deleted items colomn appears to be unchanged.
Did you say in your original post you had run eseutil /p

if so you may well need to run ISINTEG on the database, this should be done after running ESEUTIL /p
I believe I did but I will run it again tonight (ISINTEG) to verify.  I just have to wait until after hours to dismount the store.  
I just ran ISINTEG -fix alltests and it says it fixed 23 errors.  However the deleted items remain unchanged as well as the whitespace.  The normal maintenance window I set is from 6pm to 6am but still no change.  If it is corrupt message(s), how would I identify which?
Also, the MFCMAPI tool download locations seem to no longer be valid, or they're having server problems themselves.
Can you set the maintenance window to run all the time with the custom schedule?
Then restart the information store service then give it an hour to run through the database.
I will give it a try.  I set the maintenance to run all the time, but I can't restart the information store service yet because I'm still performing a full backup.  Although it does appear that some of the mailboxes are showing 0 deleted items, which is encouraging.
Excellent well done!
You may not need to restart the service.
The backup completed a bit ago.  I've also restarted the information store service and also rebooted the server.  I still see no change in 7 of the mailboxes's deleted items.  The rest are all 0 as they should be, but the mailboxes taking up the most space remain untouched.  I really don't like having to wake up at 5:00 am every morning to remount the store, so I really appreciate the help!
The 7 user mailboxes still have the same amount of deleted items.  According to ESM, the deleted items are taking up approx. 40,965,000 kb.  
Have you tried the MAPI utility?
I used MFCMAPI to examine the user's mailbox showing the most deleted items, and no messages appear when I check the "deleted items" folder in both MFCMAPI as well as in Outlook.  I also checked one of the other mailboxes with the same result... The deleted items folder is empty as far as I can see, but somehow exchange still believes there's messages (a lot of them) stored somewhere.  
I think your only option maybe to export all the mail/contacts/calendars to PST delete the mailbox then recreate it and import all the mail back in.
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Glen Knight
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I selected "recover deleted items" and it showed a good amount of items in the list.  I selected all and deleted them.  However, ESM didn't show much of a change for that user.  If I was going to export to pst and recreate mailbox, what program would you suggest?
It may take a while for those changes to be reflected in ESM.
But that should sort it.
The maintenance tasks run every 15 minutes.

If that doesn't work then use outlook to export all mail/calendar/contacts to pst delete, recreate then reimport.
I've been logging into the user's accounts using Outlook from a computer authenticated as a domain administrator.  I'm finding that the inbox, junk mail, sent items and deleted items folders all contain email available for recovery.  For some reason, the configuration dealing with the retention and deletion of these emails failed to apply to 7 out of 22 mailboxes.  I've had the retention time set to 14 days for 6 months now, yet in the email boxes I'm seeing email from over 1 year ago.  I'm selecting all of the messages and deleting them and it seems to be working.  it's going to be a pain because I still have 5 more email boxes to go through, but I've already managed to free up approx 24gb of space.  Of course I won't see how much I've really freed until the next 1221 event is logged at 5am.  It appears my days of waking up (or staying up) until 4:30 am to restart the information store are over.  Thanks for all your help, and I hope Microsoft has fixed this retention period bug in Exchange 2007.  
I don't know when he sleeps...honestly.  The responses to my posts were fast and on-point.  He offered a lot of suggestions to try for a troublesome problem.
Sounds like some corruption in the mailboxes, you probably need to export them and re-create as per my previous posts otherwise you could end up with the same problem.

Now you have created some whitespace you really need to set mailbox size limits so the problem doesn't happen again.

For future reference to defrag the database (only required if physical space is a problem) then you run ESEUTIL /d

only ever use ESEUTIL /p if you are dealing with a corrupt database.

A good tutorial on the use of ISINTEG and ESEUTIL can be found here: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-ISINTEG-ESEUTIL.html
You may also want to check this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288115

it could explain why they are not included in the management process
What program works the best for importing/exporting mailboxes?  I tried a few but wasn't very impressed.