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frtoolsFlag for United States of America

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Microsoft, Exchange 2003, SP2 - eseutil not compressing edb file

We have Microsoft Exchange 2003 with SP2 installed handling a single mailbox - it is the customer service e-mail for our business. The server is running Windows Server 2003 SBE. I have removed a lot of e-mail from the mailbox (several hundred thousand) by transferring them to a .pst file as a means to archive them. However, I have not been successful at getting the edb file to compress using eseutil. I usually clean the mailbox up like this every 12-24 months because it starts to slowdown response time at the clients when it gets over 12 Gigs. In this case I let is get to 14 Gigs but have not had any size warnings or mounting troubles. Here are the steps that I have taken:

1) Transferred the archive e-mails to a .pst file that has now been closed
2) Emptied the deleted folder on all computer that access the inbox (I deleted 10-20,000 emails that I did not want to archive)
3) Checked the ID 1221 log - it shows that I should gain about 4 gigs (current size is edb= 14.8 G  stm = 34M - please note that when I run the best practices analyzer it does say that the entire store is 16GB)
4) Retention days are set to "0"
4) Run eseutil command as I have in the past (the text for the command with switches is cut and pasted from my notes - it has always worked before)
5) eseutil ran with no errors.... but the datbase did not shrink in size
6) I repeated this twice with the same results

I have now tried again after a restart and am getting a jcb.dll error. I have had something like this happen in the past and I believe that I got around it by turning off the switchin the eseutil command for making a backup copy automatically (I did though make a backup copy manually just before running eseutil). I cancelled out of the process because I did not know where to grab the jcb.dll from.

My original files are fine and I should have ample room for the backup and making more copies. I have not made any registry changes for DB size because it did not seem to be an issue - if you think I should change it to be sure, let me know the MS knowledgebase link and I will give it a try.

Thanks
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coolsport00
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i would suggest that you do eseutil defrag to run defragmentation on ur database. Even when u have removed data from database, the pointers are still not free and pointing to the location on the database where once data was stored.... Defrag takes pretty long, however it will resolve ur problem
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It was the /3GB switch that solved the problem of both the dll failure and the proper execution of eseutil. I have not seen the switch mentioned often in many of the knowledgebase articles and it would be good to add it when instructing someone on running eseutil. "Before (or after) running eseutil, you should also consider changing the switch if you have increased memory so that it will run more smoothly..."