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Problems Defragging/Compressing Exchange 2000 Mailbox Store

Hello-

I am having a problem compressing my Exchange 2000 mailbox store.

My Exchange server has reached its 16GB limit. I have enabled the temporary 17GB store size limit to allow the users to log in and move older mail messages to archived PST files or delete them all together. When I use the Exchange System Manager for the size of the mailboxes, now the total size of all mailboxes is down to about 8GB.

I have run the Eseutil /d command to defrag/compress my mailbox. Unfortunately, this did not have the desired result. The combined size of my priv1.stm and priv1.edb files are still about 16GB combined. I have run this three times now, once using the /t temporary flag hoping this would create a new file all together. All attempts have had the same result (ending files are about 16GB combined). I have also run the isinteg command, but this did not seem to have any effect.

Researching this issue, I have examined the white space of my mailbox store using eseutil /ms. If I am reading this correctly, the number listed as "Free:" at the end of the first section is to be multiplied by 4096bytes to determine how much space can be recovered in the STM file by a defrag/compress process. This number is 97. Does this mean that I will gain only 400KB?? The number at the end of the test is 5793, which by my understanding is the amount (* 4096bytes) that can be recovered from the edb file (roughly 23MB??).

My question is this: If Exchange System Manager shows all of the mailboxes in my mailstore have a combined total size of about 8GB, and my STM and EDB files are 16GB, why does Eseutil /ms only say I can recover 23MB? Is there another way to compress this file? The next plan of attack I can think of is to remove all users' mail to temporary PST files and create brand new mailstore (a step I would like to avoid if possible).

Please let me know what I am missing.

Thanks for your help.
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rakeshmiglani
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ctsmequon

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Good thought. I had the retention for both items and mailboxes set to 30 days. Since the majority of the mail was cleaned up in the last week, on Sunday I set the items retention to 3 days. Checking this morning, event id 1221 still says I will only gain 35MB with a defrag/compression. Do I need to do something to force the private store to purge the messages that are outside of the retention time period?
there is also checkbox under the limits tab. it is called " do not delete items and mailboxes unless the store has been backed up"
is that checked?
No, it was not. After waiting several hours I received a new 1221 event saying there were 8GB available. Thanks for the help!