Exchange consuming too much space! 1

[HardwareGuys]

Our small business has a Win2K server with a 9GB hard drive on which the OS and MS Exchange Server are installed. Recently the \ProgramFiles\exchgsrvr directory has ballooned to consume over 5.8GB of space on this drive, resulting in a very full drive. This was a result of accidentally opening up the SMTP virtual server so that it was accessable by anyone on the internet. I have increased the security for the SMTP virtual server, and stopped and deleted all mail quues, but this did not seem to free up any hard drive space!? We have only 5 e-mail accounts configured on the server, and only one is actually used (yet 2 show over 1500 messages in the mailbox).

What tools are available to allow me to signifigantly reduce the ammount of hard drive space that Exchange is consuming?

 

[Marcs41]

Defrag !
See also thread858-520993 [sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, excpect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC! - Marc[/sub]

 

[HardwareGuys]

Thank you for your reply.

I can not defrag as there is less than 3% of space left on the drive, and the defrag program reports that it needs at least 15% free space in order to operate.

Thanks for the link. That thread contains references to "Mailbox Manager" and also a reference to "eseutil /d". I can not find "Mailbox Manager", and typing the command "eseutil /d" from a command prompt results in an "'eseutil' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." message. I'm extremely ufamiliar with Exchange, so please be patient with my ignorance.

In the start menu for "Start -> Programs -> Microsoft Exchange", I have "Active Directory Cleanup Wizard", "Active Directory Users and Computers", "Migration Wizard", and "System Manager". There is no "Mailbox Manager". "System Manager" displays an MMC style console, but I can find nothing to do with "Mailbox Manager"

Manually checking the properties for the individual folders on the drive, I find that "\Program Files\exchsrvr\Mailroot\vsi 1\BadMail" is using 956MB of the disk space. Is it safe to siply delete the contents of this directory, or will that cause additional problems?



Also, on a related note:

The reason I opened the SMTP server for public internet access is becuse we have a user who connects to mutliple different domain based networks with his laptop, and needs to be able to send outgoing e-mail from wherever he may be, without changing his SMTP server settings every time. SO how can I allow him to use our SMTP server to send e-mail from anywhere on the internet, but not allow anyone else access to the SMTP services? The user does not log-in to our domain, and does not need a user account in our domain.

 

[Marcs41]

With Defrag, I did not mean the Harddisk, but exchange eseutil.

See also:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;170091

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;192185

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;183888

For Badmail:

Stop the SMTP service. To do so, follow these steps:
In Computer Management, double-click the Services and Applications branch, and then click Services.
In the right pane, right-click Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), and then click Stop on the shortcut menu.

Delete all messages from the Badmail folder. By default, the Badmail folder is located in the Exchsrvr\Mailroot folder.

Start the SMTP service.
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, excpect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC! - Marc[/sub]

 

[lesleint]

To allow him to send mail from anywhere then just go to your SMTP Properties page, which can be found in the System Manager for Exchange, and go to the Access tab then the Relay button and make sure it says Only The List Below and have the bottom box checked. This will make any server that tries to relay through you authenticate itself to your Active Directory which it can't. So basically the only people that can Relay are your users in Active Directory.

 

[Bod29]

you can go ahead and delete the contents of the badmail folder without any problems, this just related to undeliverable mail produced by the spammers when your server was an open relay.

I had the same problem last week !!