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swatgear

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Maximum Mailbox Store limit reached, Exchange shuts down despite deleting 5GB of email

Hello,

Just recently I started having Exchange shut itself down because we reached the 18 GB limit. As a result I had everyone delete as much of their old email as possible. Altogether we've deleted about 5 GB.

However, running the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer tells me that my Mailbox Store is still 20 GB. Why does it still think that it is 20 GB? I thought that Exchange defragmented itself everyday so I just assumed this problem would go away once we all deleted a lot of email.

I know there is a registry entry I can add to increase the limit but I wanted to find out why it hasn't fixed itself before I went ahead and made that modification. Also I'd like to find out how to get an accurate count of the Mailbox Store. What do I need to do?



Thanks.
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dauman
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Nitin Gupta
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robrandon

Exchange only counts the used space within the database towards it's upper limit.  

Have the items from the mailboxes been SHIFT - DELETED?

What errors are in the event log when it is shutting down?
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@gupnit

In the link you sent you mention changing the Deleted Item Retention to 3 or 4 days. Mine is currently at 7 days. Could it be that even though the email has been deleted*, the db file size is still large because it has not removed the items due to the 7 day limit?

Another question: when I look at the Mailboxes view in System Manager I can watch the values drop as people delete email from their Deleted Items box. So even though these numbers drop, does this view EXCLUDE the items in the "retention" store?


* My users use both Shift+Del as well as deleting things normally and then going into their Deleted Items box and deleting from there.
Shift+Del should remove from the db.  If they delete from the Deleted Items box, it will be recoverable until your deleted item retention period passes, thereby not freeing up db space until that time.

Well yes ! The solution here is Offline Defrag as mentioned in my full response :-)!
Yes retention is not calculated for Mailboxes
Thanks
Nitni
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