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Reclaiming Space from deteled mailboxes

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by matthew.hawker

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Hi,
We run Exchange 5.5, SP4 on NT4, SP6a. After deleting a large number of large mailboxes, i haven't seen the space recovered by the online defrag (Ie from the results displayed by event 1221). Our deleted items retention time is set to 5 days and this time has well and truely passed.

Do I need to run an offline defrag to recover this space?

Thanks

1 reply

by bigwazza

Before you do anything, do a backup!!! Maybe do this out-of-hours too.

I found this a long time ago, but only tried it once (it didn't cause a problem). Firstly shutdown the mail store service (it's good to have a batch job do this) - I would shut them all down to be sure:
C:>net stop "Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service"
C:>net stop "Microsoft Exchange Event Service"
C:>net stop "Microsoft Exchange Message Transfer Agent"
C:>net stop "Microsoft Exchange Information Store"
C:>netstop "Microsoft Exchange Directory"
C:>net stop "Microsoft Exchange System Attendant"

You may need to shut down some antivirus services - the ones relating to e-mail.

Next, go to the directory where the mail databases are (that's pub.edb and priv.edb). Now run the eseutil, located in WinNT\System32, again, I have a batch job (I've removed some directory structure):

eseutil /g f:\...\pub.edb
if errorlevel 0 eseutil /d f:\...\priv.edb

Restart your services.

Test your mail system.

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