Interrnet Mail Service Mailbox- HOW BIG?

[bchizary]

Hi just been doing a bit of cleaning up on our exchange server as the drive is getting a bit full and i noticed a mailbox called 'Internet Mail Service' and it has a size of 230MB- just wondering what that is all about and if i can clean that out or make it any smaller etc.

Thanks

BenC

 

[zbnet]

It's a mailbox used by the IMS as a temporary store for message that are passing through IMS - ie transcient messages. Mine is 0, so it's likely these are bad or corrupt messages that have accumulated over the years.

You could try doing a mailbox clean on it (from Admin), but stop the IMS service first.

 

[bchizary]

thanks, how do i do a mailbox clean?

 

[zbnet]

Admin program; select mailbox in Recipients container; Tools menu; Clean Mailbox...; select required options and click OK - take a good online backup first if you think you might mess it up!!

 

[bchizary]

hi- tried that- slight problem, the option to clean mailbox is greyed out- if i go into recipients the mailbox is not there- but if i go to mailbox resources i can see it and the size of it as well.

very strange...

 

[zbnet]

Ah, good point: the IMS mailbox isn't listed in the Recipients container, and you can only clean mailboxes listed there.

You're going to have to use a utility called mdbvu32.exe to clean this mailbox. You still need to stop the IMS while you do it. mdbvu32.exe is quite a low-level tool, if you go wild you can seriously mess us your IMS mailbox using this; so my advice about backups is emphasised even more strongly prior to firing this util up. Instructions at

http://exchange.mvps.org/how_to_access_ims_mailbox_frames.htm

and also on the MS KB if you want to search it on how to use the tool.