Cannot completely remove deleted mail from mailbox

[tpulley]

I have a user (at least one that I know of) who has deleted mail in their deleted folder they have emptied everything in their deleted folder.

I went into owa and cleaned it out just to be sure. In Exch Sys Manager when I add the column to show deleted mail his shows 230mb. I am sure this is still reading this as he is still over his mailbox size restrictions. Temporarily I bumped up his limits.

I even tried running the mailbox manager to remove any deleted emails from his account over 1 day and ran that. It found 29 messages and cleared out about 5 mb. The emails in his deleted folders were deleted about a week ago by one of the IT guys when the user's mailbox got the over sized limit warnings.

So Tuesday I changed the Deleted mail retention settings (Deletion limit settings) to 1 day. I have stopped and started the IS a couple of times since then.


Any idea how to completely clean these out once and for all?

Thanks in advance.

 

[baddos]

Is your backup sofware working properly? It may not be pruning the deleted items because it doesn't have a sucessfull backup.

You can also open up outlook and go to the deleted item recovery section and manually delete the emails.

 

[tpulley]

I am getting successful backups according to BE 12.5 reports. I had tried deleting from the recovery section in outlook. It doesn't show these files.

Thanks for these ideas though.

 

[sunnyc7]

tpulley.

What is your deleted items retention policy in exchange ?
After you hard delete an item (shift+del) - deleted mails go to Exchange dumpster.

How to check your deleted items retention

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF022.html

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124314(EXCHG.65).aspx

Let me know if that helped.

thanks

 

[tpulley]

I changed the deleted items retention policy to be 1 day. I just checked and this is still not gone. I say gone, when I check in ESM I open mailboxes, and the user, then add the deleted Items to the column. Users delted folder still show a large number. It has been about 10 days or more since I dumped the deleted folder.

 

[sunnyc7]

Did you restart the exchange information store ?

Is your database ok ?
Any errors related to ESE in event logs under application ?
Let me know.

 

[tpulley]

I had restarted the IS within a few hours after I had deleted hard deleted the emails.. I have never seen anything to me that indicated there were any issues with the ESE. I just scoured the logs for any errors related, none show up.

 

[sunnyc7]

Corrupt Profile / OST?

Did you try creating a new profile and setting them up with that. See if the problem gets resolved that way ?

 

[tpulley]

Great ideas. I did already try this. I created a new profile, and then renamed the .ost to .old so it cannot find it at all.

 

[sunnyc7]

Download

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...82-4c6e-4ec5-983e-127100d71376&displaylang=en

See how to use Information store viewer here

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Troubleshooting_and_repairing_mailboxes_and_databases.html

 

[tpulley]

Thanks a lot sunnyc7. I am going to try this. I hadn't heard of this. I am going to try this. Will let you know.

Again, thanks. It looks like I should be able to find what i need in there.

 

[sunnyc7]

You're welcome.