Mailboxes are not getting smaller after Archiving with EV 9.0

[lnino1982]

Hi at all.

I am using Symantec Enterprise Vault 9.0 running on Windows 2k8 R2.

On the mailserver site we have Exchange 2007 running on Windows 2k8 R2.

The archiving of EV is running fine, backing up the data with Backup Exec 2014.

But when I check the size of the mailbox for example of John Doe, before the archive of EV it has 5 GB.

John doe is working for the company for 3 years and I have set that all mails older than 1 year should be archived.

After the archive the mailbox of the user John Doe, still has 5 GB.

Isn't the purpose of archiving mails to shrink the mailboxes?

What can I do, to get the mailbox smaller after the archiving?

Do I have to take the exchange DB and run eseutil?

[GertjanA]

Hello,

This depends on some factors. In your archiving policy, do you create shortcuts? When so, is the setting to create shortcut immediately, or after backup? What is the shortcut setting in regards to content? Message body? Perhaps switch to 'first 2000 characters of body".

If after backup, verify that when the backup finishes, the archive attribute is cleared from the EV-files in the storage location.

It might be that John doe's mailbox is not yet archived.

You might want to run an archiving run in report-mode, to see what will happen. I also advise to upgrade to ev10, possibly 11 if possible. This will give you better reporting on the archiving runs.

Regards

[lnino1982]

These are the settings I have set in Main Policy of the Mailbox under Policies:

[GertjanA]

Your policy is not correct imho...

You stated:

John doe is working for the company for 3 years and I have set that all mails older than 1 year should be archived.

Your policy however shows you archive everything older than 3 years. Archiving Rules tab:

"Archive items when they are older than"

Hence, no archiving from this John Doe mailbox, as that probably does not have items older than 3 years....

[lnino1982]

My mistake. I have uploaded the screenshots of my default policy.

But the policy of John Doe is a different one. Here are the correct screenshots of the policy which is assigned to John Doe.

The Target configuration looks like that:

In the tab target I can see the assigned Active Directory Group.

John Doe is a member of this group.

[GertjanA]

ok. If you do a 'report run' of the task against this users mailbox, what does the report say?

Rightclick task, click 'run now' select Report mode, select 'specify mailbox', select John Doe mailbox, Run.

Monitor MSMQ A3. When that is 0, look in the 'reports' folder for the txt file for the run. Copy content, paste into excel. does it show how many items would be archived?

I have seen that the report run does not contain anything, which indicates the 'hidden message' is corrupt.

You then need to:

Disable user for archiving.

Zap mailbox (see Utilities guide on how to do that)

Enable mailbox for archiving, sync mailbox, redo report run. That should then report items to be archived. When that is the case, perform a run now in normal mode.

[lnino1982]

The result looks like that:

[GertjanA]

ok, so if you do a run now in normal mode, does it archive 25 items?

[lnino1982]

I see in the log file that mails have been archived from the user max, andrea and robert.

But I can't find John Doe.

I studied now the logs from the past weeks and month.

I see no entry of John Do at all. It looks like never any mail has been archived from John Doe.

But I have installed the EV application on the client, like I do it on every oulook client.

And you can see in the Outlook of John Doe the EV symbol infront of the mails.

And you can see the text, "... has been archived by Enterprise Vault....".

Hmm, what's wrong? Did I made a misconfiguration?

[GertjanA]

Well, what I would suggest, get a full overview of the mailbox using powershell (not sure if

(get-mailboxfolderstatistics "John Doe" | FT Name, Folderpath, foldersize) works on Exchange 2007, but it is worth a try.

Take this as example. John Doe works here 3 years and 1 day. Items older than 3 years are archived.

On that first day, John receive some 25 mails about his account, company info etc. these mails in total were 1 MB. These mails are now archived, which leaves 25 shortcuts. Which total (approximately) 200Kb.

Roughly checked, the mailbox would have the same size. It is only when you compare exact numbers, you will see a difference.

On this day (after 3 years of hard work), John receives 50 mails a day, totalling 10MB. Archiving however his3 year old mails (which most likely are still fewer, and smaller) will not lower his mailbox. Most likely, you will see only after another 3 years (so John start work x+6 years) that EV does its work.

I suggest to lower your archiving rule to 1 year. That does mean discussing with the community why they need 3 years of items in the mailbox. Shortcuts should be sufficient :)

I do not see a problem on your side, unless you can prove with accurate figures the mailbox is not being archived.