Exchange 5.5

[lobadobadingdong]

We have exchange 5.5 non-enterprise, we recently hit the 16GB "wall" on our information store, and where able to do an offline defrag and get exchange back up.

I can't find any good way to monitor the size of the information store, I'm guessing it uses some kind of compression, as we deleted (or moved to .pst) ~20GB of old e-mail from within exchange administrator, and the size of the information store database is still 16GB.

Google searches are currently not turning up much info, everything says upgrade to 2000 or 2003 exchange (which we will be doing by the end of the year), but we really need a way to monitor this to make sure it doesn't happen again before the upgrade happens.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Lots of ways to check and control mailbox sizes. And, even upgrading to 2003 will give you the same limit unless it's enterprise version.

If you have deleted item retention, that could explain why the space is still all taken up.

If you go into the admin and browse the exchange server, you'll find "mailbox resources" and it will list everybody along with the size of their mailboxes. Easy to spot the big offenders and send them a nice e-mail.

Also, for the big users, set Outlook up to auto archive to a pst on a drive that gets backed up.

You can also limit the size of the users' mailboxes so the inconsiderate ones will be forced to purge their deleted items of junk and properly catalog useful e-mails. But that, for me, was a last resort we avoided.

The exchange 2003 upgrade is the craziest thing you've ever seen. But so worth it....for the free spam filter and Outlook Web Access alone.