Exchange 5.5 Mailbox Limit

[myarul]

I have allowed one user in my Exchange Server to have unlimited mailbox size. Currently, the user mailbox size is 230MB. However, does Exchange 5.5 have any limit to it before it starts behaving weirdly?

 

[brontosaurus]

no limit really. It's whatever your server is capable of handling....

 

[DSpen]

There is meant to be a limit on the whole Private Information Store of 16Gb, I have not come across a limit on an individual mailbox apart from the limits set up manually.

Our Private Information Store is currently 13Gb and I have come here looking for answers on shrinking it down since I know it is keeping stuff from mailboxes that don't exist anymore.

 

[brontosaurus]

16GB limit is only for Standard Edition.

The only way to shrink the store is offline defrag.

 

[DSpen]

Hi,
To run the offline defrag you need to have 110% free space of the file you want to defrag. Our private store is 13 Gb which filled the disk so we put a bigger disk in yesterday and copied everything over. With 17 GB of free space with the new disk I ran the defrag last night only to come in this morning to find it had not freed up any space whatsoever.

We have not been able to run a backup for many months and I noticed that there is an option set not to delete the private store until a full backup has been performed. Which excitement of finding this I quickly unchecked this option and watched, hoping the space would come back, but it still has not.

I then found a further option to schedule IS maintainence, but even after setting the time to run now (rather than early hours of the morning) it still has not given me the space back.

I am running out of ideas and cannot find anything more useful on the microsoft support pages.

 

[brontosaurus]

First of all, you need to verify that there's actually space available for freeing...open you Event Viewer on the exchange server and go to the Applications log. Scroll backward until you get to around 1 A.M. and look for an event with the following properties:

Source: MSExchangeIS Private
Category: General
Event: 1221

When you find this, pop it open. It should read something like this:
The database has xxx megabytes of free space after online defragmentation has terminated.

The "xxx" is the amount of free space you would gain back by running an offline defrag.

As for the setting about not deleting until a full backup has been performed, that's referring to log files...

 

[DSpen]

The event log shows that I would gain 2Gb, but I was expecting to gain a lot more. I think I'll have to do a proper tidy up on the server removing every old mailbox I find, before trying the offline defrag again.

I think I'll get a calculator and total up each user's mailbox size - maybe it will add up to 13Gb after all. It's amazing how fast the private store can grow.

Thanks for your help.

 

[swp13]

Along with that I would not have any users mailboxes with no limits. If they get a heavy spam or repeat delivery of an email it could eat up your free space quick.
I would set up that user with a really big mailbox, but never just unlimited.