All, I've been moving email from employees that have left our company. I create a PST folder and copy the mail from the users inbox/Sent Items into that folder. I then delete all the emails in that folder and I empty the Deleted Items. The folders in Outlook are now all empty. When I go into Exchange System Manager the mailbox size is not reduced. What gives here? Thanks you for any help understanding this issue, F

Please let other people use that time machine you just came out of, it could do a lot of good. ;) Exchange 2000 had a deleted item retention of 7 days by default. Its possible you need to purge the mailbox dumpster or wait a week and check back. Mike Crowley | MVP My Blog -- Planet Technologies

Removing mails from deleted items folder wont recover you any space soon, as mails deleted from deleted items folder moves to recover deleted items and stays there until retention time set to it exceeds. if you need to free up space soon then go for shift delete and wait for online de-fragmentation to kickin and remove the white space

How long did you wait? If just recent, wait until the exchange online maintenance is run typically around the night time by default. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Removing mails from deleted items folder wont recover you any space soon, as mails deleted from deleted items folder moves to recover deleted items and stays there until retention time set to it exceeds. if you need to free up space soon then go for shift delete and wait for online de-fragmentation to kickin and remove the white space shift-delete is the same thing as emptying the deleted items folder. Mike Crowley | MVP My Blog -- Planet Technologies

Thanks Mike for the humor and an answer. I'm getting ready to upgrade to either to 2010 or go to Exchange Online. My main purpose is to do a little cleanup of the DB. Do you know of anyone who has looked at Exchange Online and then decided to stay with an in-house solution and why? Thank you again for the help, Ferrocki

so mike, shift delete on inbox will move it to recover deleted item folder

If you upgrade to Exchange 2010, you'd need to go to 2003 or 2007 first. 2010 won't play nice with 2000. I'd probably consider an Exchange 2003 upgrade first, since you can pop the disk in and hit 'go' as opposed to moving mailboxes all over the place. Exchange Online is another story. If you're going to cut-over to their service, you can do so from 2003, but if its going to be a slower transition you need to implement 2010 on-prem anyway. As for your actual question: I have seen people decide against Exchange online due to these types of reasons (in no particular order): went with gmail instead. this doesn't seem to happen too much in my experience, but often with EDUs since they are worried about being cool more so than having a robust email platformfounded/unfounded fear about data ownership and regulatory complliancefear of outsourcing their own job (shameful motivation, if you ask me)costand the big one: highly skilled email admins frequently want to be in control of their systems. with a hosted solution you give up some control to people who may see you as just another number. When Mr. CEO wants a neck to grab, telling them that some guy over the phone is 'working on it' may not fly. Mike Crowley | MVP My Blog -- Planet Technologies

so mike, shift delete on inbox will move it to recover deleted item folder The "recoverable items folder" is new in Exchange 2007, but the same concept has been around for a while. Perhaps the reason you think its a "more serious" deletion is because it doesn't show up when you try to recover it from the "recover deleted items" feature in outlook. But that feature is limited to the deleted items folder by default until you change a registry key on the client. Mike Crowley | MVP My Blog -- Planet Technologies