Purged Deleted Items still showing in Exchange Admin

[NickA]

I have purged the deleted items from a few users accounts who had excessively large amounts of (deleted) deleted items. We are running exchange 2k on windows 2k server and outlook xp clients.

I did this through Outlook deleted items folder using 'recover deleted items' option, selecting them all and hitting 'purge'.
They all disappeared but when I look in exchange admin at the mailbox resources there is still a huge amount showing in the 'deleted items (kb)' column against the relevant users (i hit refresh by the way!)
why is this and how do I get rid of them for good ? Is there some other routine I need to run to clear them from the private information store ?

 

[ArmandC]

I am having the same dilema. Even though a user\mailbox is deleted the free space is never actually returned as it still remains part of the total information store size. I wonder if doing an online\offline defrag of the information store would some how reset\release those values?

 

[brontosaurus]

offline defrag, yes. the database will never "shrink" while online. it will have free space when you delete items, but it's physical size will not change.