Getting lots of Event 9667 MSExchangeIS named properties quota limit errors?

Question

Recently I started getting Event 9667 errors from MSExchangeIS:

Failed to create a new named property for database "First Storage Group\Mailbox Store (LIMA)" because the number of named properties reached the quota limit (8192).
User attempting to create the named property: "SYSTEM"
Named property GUID: 00020386-0000-0000-c000-000000000046
Named property name/id: "X-Xdji"
For more information, click http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

I could raise the named properties quota, but something is weird. The "Named property" for each error is different, and looks random:

X-Xdji

X-Vldrh

X-Luap

X-Hqktb

... etc.

I may be wrong, but I'm assuming that these header properties are attached to SPAM messages. If I increase the limit, it's just going to fill up the table eventually. I understand that there's no way to clear properties without creating a new store. How might I deal with this problem?

Oh, Exchange 2003.

Answer 1

This Exchange Team blog posting can give you some more background (and you can see even more technical background here), but you're essentially right in that these are coming from X-Headers on messages and that increasing the quota will only cause the table to fill again later.

Exchange 2007 and 2010 deal with this "problem" better. If you're stuck on Exchange 2003 you could either live with it, or get an SMTP proxy to filter junk messages or strip unwanted X-Headers. (There's code to strip unwanted X-Headers on Codeplex, but it's for Exchange 2007 only. In theory, though, a transport event sink for Exchange 2003 could do the same thing.)

I've Exchange 2003 installations that are fairly old (one that's 6 years, another that's around 3) that have been logging these "errors" for a few years but, otherwise, have been working fine. The only problems I've seen are that both ActiveSync and Blackberry Enterprise Server expect to be able to create named properties in their initial setup. I had problems getting both of these working (neither of which offered anything in the way of helpful error messages, either) on an Exchange installation that had an exhausted named property quota. Bumping the quota slightly made them both take off. (See this blog posting for some details re: ActiveSync...)