How to manage archives in Exchange

[Brasco]

We are running MS Exchange on NT 4.0 SP5. In our effort to free some space on the drive, we want to shrink the following directories:

exchsrvr\incdata\in\archive
exchsrvr\incdata\out\archive

These directories are occupying more than 600MB on the disk. Has anyone had a problem like this? Any ideas on how to do it what effects it will have on the Exchange server will be appreciated.

Thanx!

 

[rws]

The items in these directories are copies of messages that have passed through the IMS. The way they got there is by having Message Archival set on Diagnostics Logging tab of IMS. You can open them in Notepad, but of course you won't be able to view attachments.
Unless you have some business reason to retain them, you can just delete them. If you need to save them, you can just move them out of there and put them elsewhere.
While you're at it, check smtp protocol logging. If that is set to max, it will be writing log files to the imcdata\log directory. All other logging is written to the application log.
If you need to have copies of every email, look into Message Journaling, or using imsext.dll. There are KB articles about both.