How top open or clean very large mailbox ?

[riwa]

Hi,

We had a problem with a mailbox which went into a loop. Mail was auto-forwarded to an external email address but that mailbox reached its limit so it started sending mail back but those mails were sent back again to the external address causing a loop.

Unfortunately we discovered this to late so now we have a user with a mailbox which is 1.2GB in size and contains about 360.000 emails !

When I try to open this mailbox in Outlook 2000 it takes about 45 minutes to open (if it opens at all) but than I can't do anything because Outlook crashes as soon as I try to do anything. It doesn't seem to be a memory problem because you don't see outlook using a lot of memory and the exchange server (5.5 sp4) doesn't use much more memory than normal.

So I was hoping anyone knows a different way to access this mailbox so I can copy or move all the emails and appointments and tasks etc that needs to be saved to a personal folder or something like that.


Richard

 

[zbnet]

Use exmerge to Archive the Inbox (which presumably contains all the looped messgaes) to a PST file - the Archive setting will delete them from the mailbox after it has extracted the messages from the Inbox.

 

[riwa]

Not sure if this will work. We tried a similair thing with the delivery setting (delivery to personal folder instead of mailbox). This takes very long (2-3 seconds per email).

I also tried offline working but as soon as I close Outlook so it can copy the mail to a local file, Outlook hangs.

Is exmerge a Exchange 5.5 file or is it a standalone program ?

 

[zbnet]

You're not sure this will work? The other things you tried aren't related to Exmerge. Delivery to PST works on new mail, not existing mail.

I'm not sure I understand your last question. Exmerge is a utility that was developed to bulk export and import PSTs from stores. It's not part of the default installation.

 

[DestinysDream]

Exchange 5.5 has a clean mailbox tool that you can use if the other options won't work.

If anyone calls and says "I know a little something about computers" just tell them to reformat it.

 

[zbnet]

True, but riwa wants to retrieve the email and appointments from the mailbox. It's pretty impossible to get the mailbox clean tool to delete only messages that are looped, and not delete all the good messages. How you would propose he does that?

 

[riwa]

Thanks for your replies.
I got it working. I installed NT4 and Exchange 5.5 again but on an old server which was must faster than the workstation I tried earlier.

After waiting for quite a long time I was able to copy all the emails and appointments etc to a personal folder.

So the problem is solved and this topic can be closed.


Richard