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Exchange 2000 missing mailbox items

timheaney
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Last Modified: 2008-01-09
The sum of the number of items in all the users mailboxes as shown in ESM is appox 1000 items less than the number of items shown as being backed up by Veritas in the daily full backup.

The number of mailboxes is the same in both, so where are the 1000 items that Veritas is backing up but I can't see in ESM?

These 1000 items are approx 2% of the total.
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LeeDerbyshire
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Commented:
As far as I can tell, ESM does not show hidden messages in its reports. There are lots of hidden messages in Exchange mailboxes because that is how things like Out-Of-Office replies, and Inbox rules are stored.  So, for example, if ESM or Outlook displays ten items in your Inbox, and you have two Inbox rules, and an O-O-O message configured, then there will be thirteen items in your Inbox, three of which are hidden.  Have a look at the Exchange Explorer from the SDK if you are interested in that kind of thing.  Exchange Explorer shows the hidden messages, too, and is a good way for you to compare the numbers.  As a rough guess, I would say that 800~900 users might account for an extra 1000 hidden messages, assuming that most people don't need to set up rules, but most will have an O-O-O message.
timheaney

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Commented:
I have installed Exchange Explorer but cannot get very far as I don't know the exchange store url  - everything I try produces the error message "server is not available or an unrecoverable error occured".

As far as the users are concerned I only have 17 mailboxes and I am pretty sure that no-one has set up any rules. There are probably maximum 10 O-O-O messages configured.
LeeDerbyshire
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Commented:
I'm sure that 17 mailboxes would not account for that many hidden messages.  I wonder if it's referring to items in Deleted Item Retention?  If so, I would expect far more than 1000, though.  Depends on the DIR time, of course.

The store URL is generally http://servername/exchange/username .  The best way to get this is to start OWA, select View Source from the IE menu, and see what the <BASE HREF is.
timheaney

Author

Commented:
The DIR time has always been set to 0 and I've checked to see that it hasn't changed.

I have found the URL and so will spend some time looking through the mailboxes to see what I can find - any ideas as to what I might be looking for?
LeeDerbyshire
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Commented:
It will take a while.  You will need to log into each mailbox, and then click on each folder, and get its DAV:itemcount .  Added together, this should give a number higher than that reported for the mailbox in ESM.  It's not likely to account for 1000 items among 17 mailboxes, though.  Is there any chance that the 1000 items are in Public Folders?  Have you included the SystemMailbox in your count?
timheaney

Author

Commented:
We don't have any public folders and yes, I have included the system mailbox in the total.

I'll work my way through the folders and see what I can find.
timheaney

Author

Commented:
I have worked my way through a lot of the mailboxes and folders and the only hidden items I can find are things like:
IPM.Microsoft.FolderDesign.Named View
IPM.Rule.Message
IPM.Note
IPM.MS.OutlookAgingProperties
I presume some of these are rules - I don't know what the other items are. Even though we only have 17 mailboxes there are over 600 folders - a lot of the folders include one or more items like those above (but not all folders have them) and so it is possible that the 1000 missing items are all items like those above.
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timheaney

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I think I'm probably going to leave it there for now.

Thanks for your help.

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