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zito2000Flag for United States of America

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Mail.que file and shadowredundancyQueue too large

Lately, we have been receiving alerts from our network monitoring utility that the C: drive space has been intermittently filling up, than returning to normal every few hours.

Upon further investigation, we found a file called mail.que to be the culprit. (located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\TransportRoles\data\Queue), which is about 42.7 gigs.

I ran the get-queue command and see that there are 296 items held in ShadowRedundancy (screenshot attached)

My question: Is this a normal scenario? If not, is there a way I can purge the shadow queue without causing any harm to the Exchange environment?
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timgreen7077

Yes it's not uncommon for the shadow redundancy to be high, as this a redundant copy of every message while in transit. this is used to guarantee delivery of emails if the original message fails for some reason. As long as the redundancy clears then you should be fine. you can disable shadow redundancy if you choose to, but I would advise against it. There are different factors that can cause the queue to build like that such as the type of disks you are using for mailboxes (slow), large volumes of mail, or system resource contention. If you want to disable it you can see the below link, but its not recommended:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/shadow-redundancy-exchange-2013-help
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ASKER

Thanks @timgreen

If the redundancy does not clear, is there a way to purge the shadow queue as opposed to just disabling it?
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timgreen7077

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Thanks Tim,


Much appreciated
sure thing