Exchange 2003 Recovery Items go back 3 years for 1 user

Question

I have an Exchange 2003 environment serving approx 150 users. We are quickly approaching the 75 GB limit, and need to clear out what I can until we can get a new server in place. (Probably months out...)

In trying to clean things up a bit, I discovered a problem with 1 Mailbox and it's "Recover Deleted Items" feature. He can recover emails that are a full 3 years old!

I have the Mailbox Store's "Keep Deleted Items for (days):" setting set to 2 days. I have also tried changing his mailbox to not use the Mailbox Store settings and have manually set his mailbox to 2 (and even 0 days when that didn't work).
I have a feeling that is could be accounting for a very significant portion of our Mailbox Store as he's one of the heaviest users.

I've been able to check quite a few other mailboxes, and they all seem to be working perfectly. No more than 2 or 3 days worth of deletions in the Recovery area... It appears that this one user is the only problem mailbox, but I don't know of any way to truly tell.

Does anybody know how I might be able to flush this out? Or does anybody know of another setting that might be set for this mailbox somehow? I've checked everything I can find, and there is very little of anything "special" for this user.

My first thought was to delete his mailbox and re-build it, but I'd rather not as that would be a major undertaking for this user (4GB mailbox, tons of rules, tons of email addresses, included in tons of distribution groups, etc...).
I'd rather not do that unless I absolutely have to...

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

Answer 1

This feature, known as "Dumpster Cleanup", is handled by the online Information Store maintenance functionality. By default, this runs from 00:00 to 05:00 local time.

There isn't any mechanism that I'm aware of to prevent a mailbox from being processed by dumpster cleanup.

Are your online backups running properly? I'd assume so, given that other users aren't building up dumpster items, but it's worth asking.

Are you seeing anything in the Application Event Log to indicate that there are problems occurring during the maintenance activities? If there was anywhere I'd suspect to find a smoking gun it would be here.

You can manually purge the dumpster for the affected mailbox to mark more space free in the IS database if you're running low on space. That's only a band-aid fix, but it might help.

Edit:

I'd be wary of that Information Store database based on what you've said in your comment re: your Event Log message. If you can, put up a temporary Exchange Server computer, move the mailboxes over to it, and start fresh on your production machine.

You won't have to do anything with Outlook-- Exchange is smart enough to "redirect" users to another Exchange Server computer when their mailbox is moved. As such, as long as you can muster the spare hardware you should be able to swing the mailboxes over to a temporary box, clean up the production box, and swing the mailboxes back. I wouldn't reinstall Exchange on the production box, but I would get all the mailboxes moved out of its Information Store, at which time I'd start with a fresh mailbox database.

If you cant do that, perform copious backups on the production server and run an isinteg against the store. That might clean up the problems you're seeing.