incorrect mailbox message number??

[prha]

I have a user who has around 3000 messages in their outlook account in total, including all folders, contact, calendar and journal.
If I look in Exchange under mailbox resources it says that the user has 7533 messages!
Does anyone know why the two figures could be so different?
I have looked in Back up exec and there are only about 30 associated messages.
I need to know as I am about to implement limits on all user accounts to try and free up some space but am not sure if the size of the mailboxes is a true figure if the number is so inaccurate.
If I put limits on accounts they may freeze the ccount without the user actually being over the limit.
Does anyone know why this is happening and how to correct it?
We are not using OWA so it does not relate to this.
most strange and I have not got a clue why

 

[seaeagle1]

prha,

When you go into Mailbox Resources, then go into View, do you have Total K and Total no. Items showing? That will let you know how large the actual account is using and then how many messages they have. If the user has created new folders under their mailbox, all of those items are also included in the count.

Does that help?

 

[beckas]

I wouldn't worry about the count as much as the size. If the mailbox size in Exchange Administrator matches up with what the Outlook folders add up to, the count is probably correct as well.

 

[Kenlmcse]

you say you see about 3000 items in the mailbox...

Are you sure?

If the user has reoccurring tasks, and meetings.. they count higher than one..

you might only see the one in outlook, but if it comes up every month, then that is 12..

Also, what about old stuff that was not archived? did you look for that.... When I look at users that have that same problem on my server, I look in the calendar change it to category view and then manually archive everything...

the other thing that counts is contacts birthday's.. one for the contact, one for the birthday...

bottom line is I have seen this for years, I archive and put the mailbox back to a respectable size...

I love it when users complain they gotover size limit emails from the server every 15 minutes...

 

[prha]

sea eagle. I have got those set up in exchange, and that is the figure that is incorrect.

beckas,
The size is also incorrect.

kenlmcse,
I have looked through all the items discussed above and the figure exchange has is still way higher than the actual account holds.
also I deleted everything from the administrator account to see if it happened here and there is nothing in the account now, no journals, calendar entries, contacts etc but exchange says there are 191 messages and 1910k!
I am at a complete loss as to why this happens. any more suggestions where exchange could be finding these 'messages' from?

 

[beckas]

I had this problem with one mailbox. The only way that I was able to view the mystery items was by logging into the account using the Exchange client rather than Outlook. The items were at the top level of the mailbox. It was a copy of every e-mail that the person had recieved for several months. I moved the items to a .pst file while in the Exchange client and this reduced the size of the mailbox. I have not seen the problem since. I was speaking with one of my friends that is an Exchange Administrator as well and he said that it has something to do with how the delegate permission is set up and that it has to do with the person giving a user permission to their inbox using the delegates tab rather than right clicking on the folder and giving them permission. I personally didn't investigate if this was the case since the problem stopped for the one particular user that was having the problem. Good Luck!

 

[prha]

thanks for all the advice in the end I ran IS integ, ran the optimiser again and did a defrag and this sorted out the differences. Here is an article I found on technet as well.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;259675

Thanks for all the advice.