Reviewing Users Number of Items

[dcranford]

I'm looking for a "centralized" way to review the number of items in my users Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, etc... Going to the Mailbox Resources produces some "number of items" but for the life of me I can't figure out where the number comes from. For example, it shows a user with over 33,000 items but she only has a little over 1100 Inbox and Sent Items combined. I'm beginning to run low on hard drive space and thought this would be the perfect way to review and then contact those who won't manage their mail. Any thoughts??? BTW - I think I've asked this here before so I apologize ahead of time if I have.

Deon Cranford

 

[PRW2000]

If your using exchange why dont you take advantage of the features that alow you to set the maximum size a mailbox can reach? you can specify different values for different people and surley whats more important is the size that there email takes up not how many there are of them!?

 

[dcranford]

I've thought about that and I've tried to use the data in the Mailbox Resorces as a guide. Although the hard drive space is prompting me to look for a solution, here are two real examples which puts me into circles:
UserA - Number of Items 33,656 - Total K 71,039
UserB - Number of Items 3,250 - Total K 185,513

You see, if I limit the size to 70K for example, then for whatever reason, UserB will not get what he needs. I can't tell you why so few "items" (3,250) demand so much space.
Deon Cranford
deon.cranford@scotlandhealth.org

 

[PRW2000]

More than likely it will be to do with what is contained in those messages ie attachments!

I still maintain that what you should be doing is restricting mailbox size not the ammount of messaages! If you implement a mailbox size restriction it will not delete any of the users messages! You can however specify wether or not that user will be able to send / recive messages when the mailbox reaches certain sizes and you would usually then prompt the user to del /archive messages they no longer require.

If you are using 5.5 or 2k and outlook 98+ it might also be worth seeing what the deleted item retention time is because although they no longer exist in the users outlook they are still on your server until they have been deleted for x amount of days!

 

[sheh1]

Well, there are two parts of your problem
1) Getting information about users mailbox size
2) Mapping appropriate size of your users mailboxes with what your hard disks can offer.

It is true that you should implement mailbox size limitation which would also, in a way, force your users to do housekeeping. Anyway, I too faced the same problem of inaccuracy of the mailbox size shown under mailbox resources. The numbers would just drive you into the wrong direction and users would just go crazy when you tell them to trim their mailbox size which in actual fact they might have just deleted everything and nothing else left for tehm to delete, much to their amazements and your frustrations. This is actually a problem in Exchange and perhaps you might want to refer to this article that would offer a detail explaination :

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q152/4/58.asp

Seems like a lot of administrative things to do.....

 

[dcranford]

I'm almost sorry you referred me to that KB article. What a "fix". I'm working today on the limits; hope to have a logical method in place in a couple of days. One quick question...Under Mailbox Resources, if UserA's "Total K" is 133,755, to stop this from growing immediately, would you suggest going into the UserA's mailbox Properties - Limits and setting the "Prohibit Send and Recieve K" to 135,000?
Deon Cranford
deon.cranford@scotlandhealth.org