Mailbox Items Not Deleting?

[Jeff_Harms]

We have a fairly new test setup with Vault 6.0 SP 3 and Exchange 2003 cluster. In the early stages we have a few mailboxes setup and the items appear to have archived.

The icons have updated in Outlook and I can view the items via the web interface. My question is, when the items are archived shouldn't the physical size of the Exchange mailbox shrink? The mailbox is displaying the same size before and after the archive process runs. The only setting I have found around this issue is at the policy level which states delete item after archiving and that is checked...

[Micah_Wyenn]

Jeff,
Two things to note here. If you're using the full message body as a shortcut, the actual size of the shortcut will be close to (or about 70%) of the mail message itself (without the attachment). If you want to see the size reduction from shortcutting, send yourself a 3mb (or anything large) attachment, and then archive that item. it should go from 3bm to like 5k.

Second thing, exchange deals with mailbox size reporting in a very weird way. The only way to see an actual reduction in the mailstore db file size is to do an offline defrag (which is time consuming and takes down the mailstore). When EV archives something, it leaves whitespace (which exchange will then reclaim and use for other incoming mail), but doesn't resize the mailstore dynamically.

micah

[Jeff_Harms]

Here's some more details. When I run the archive task against the test mailbox I use very strict archive policy to catch most items. The report shows that 65mb of the 71mb box is achievable.

I then run the archive task in normal mode. I log into Outlook for that user and I can see that the items in question appear to have archived as their icons have changed. The preview pane of Outlook shows the content of the mesage when highlighted. When I open an archived item from Outlook it show a message at the top of the items window stating that the item was archived and not to move or delete the item.

Just prior to the archive process, from Outlook I checked the properties of the mailbox and under folder size I could see that the total size was approx 71 mb. After running the archive task and checking the folder size from Outlook the size is the same 71mb, no reduction. I have also checked via the System Manager in Exchange same results mailbox size 71mb before and after.

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

"When I open an archived item from Outlook it show a message at the top of the items window stating that the item was archived and not to move or delete the item"

That shows for items that are pending, if your safety copy strategy is set to after back up the items have not been switched to shortcuts yet. Refer the the Admin help on Backing up vault stores under Day-to-day administration.

You can run the attrib command against the vault store partition to force the system to think the files have been backed up for now if you are just testing.


attrib -a "D:\Enterprise Vault Stores\*.*" /s

[Jeff_Harms]

Thank you the attrib command worked perfectly and the mailbox did reduce according to the previous archive report...