I am having a problem that recently started with one mailbox on an Exchange 2003 server. All other mailboxes are working fine. This particular mailbox belongs to the owner of the company and contains just about every email he has ever received, all neatly filed away in various folders. At my last check, it was 5.9GB in size with 70,347 items according to the Exchange System Manager. Trying to get it reduced is size is a non-starter so I am not even going there. This is a bit long but I have accumulated a lot of information. The problem is this; started around May 1^st, the owners iPhone stopped syncing with Exchange. Email, Calendar and Contacts all stopped synchronizing. All other mailboxes were working except this one. The log files showed the connection timing out. Outlook 2010, OWA and IMAP all work fine with this mailbox. I was pressed by the owner into rolling the system back three days from a backup but that did not solve the problem. Disconnecting the mailbox from the user and creating a new mailbox did work but as soon as I started migrating messages, calendar and contacts, the same problem started happening. I finally got the iPhone synchronized again by switching email to IMAP and contacts and calendar to iCloud. I then installed iCloud Control Panel to synchronize the contacts and calendar in Outlook with iCloud so the user is happy since he has all his data. Since I looked at this as a temporary solution, I decided to try setting up DavMail so that I could get back to direct synchronization and avoid ActiveSync. I got it setup and working with my mailbox and it worked fine. I then tested the owners mailbox and it hung. Looking through the logfiles, I find the following SELECT statement issued by DavMail and executed against my mailbox works fine and returns data but when executed against the problem mailbox it does nothing and simply stops: SELECT "http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/permanenturl","DAV:getetag","urn:schemas:httpmail:subject","http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/x10f3001f","urn:schemas:calendar:instancetype","DAV:displayname" FROM SCOPE('Shallow TRAVERSAL OF "/exchange/user.name/Contacts"') WHERE ("http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/outlookmessageclass" = 'IPM.Contact' And "DAV:isfolder" = false And "DAV:ishidden" = false And "http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/outlookmessageclass" = 'IPM.Contact') I downloaded the Exchange Explorer application and tested it with my mailbox. It works fine. When I tested it against the problem mailbox, certain folders would cause the application to lockup and I have to kill it. Other folders work fine and cause no problem. All of this points to DAV and its use by ActiveSync as the problem. I have run eseutil /p /g priv1.edb against the database as well as isinteg -s server -fix -verbose -l fixlog.txt -t C:\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA -test alltests. I have also defragmented. The isinteg tests found several issues and corrected them all. Notably the number of RestrictionFolder folders, MsgRefCt, AttachRefCt and various mailbox message sizes. Two additional runs turned up no additional errors other than the messages Ignoring message size because it is a CDO generated appointment instance. Still DAV is refusing to run properly on this mailbox. At this point, I am at a loss about what else to try. Are there any tools that will show why the SELECT statement is stopping and not doing anything further? I am wondering if there are some bad messages that could be wiped that will restore operation. The odd thing is, as I mentioned initially, Outlook 2010, OWA and IMAP all work without any problems. Only DAV is having problems.

I would suggest that you create a second mailbox for "Archive" content and get the email out. Get the item level down. I would even consider going as far as a creating a new "Primary" mailbox, moving the content out and then setting a forward on the original account to the new account. Single account issues are rarely worth troubleshooting with. ESM doesn't show you the true size of the mailbox, it could be double what you are seeing. Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

I would suggest that you create a second mailbox for "Archive" content and get the email out. Get the item level down. I would even consider going as far as a creating a new "Primary" mailbox, moving the content out and then setting a forward on the original account to the new account. Single account issues are rarely worth troubleshooting with. ESM doesn't show you the true size of the mailbox, it could be double what you are seeing. Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

I figured that would probably be the solution. If I were in a large enterprise, I would be able to enforce restrictions on size but since the problem is with the one who owns the system, it becomes a bit more dicey. As I mentioned, my solution for now is using IMAP as well as iCloud and the iCloud Control Panel. Unless that ultimately crashes and burns, I think we can live with that solution. The most critical needs for this user is not his old mail but his contacts and calendar. I have tried replicating just the 1000 or contacts to a new mailbox but I start having issues with the new mailbox.

I figured that would probably be the solution. If I were in a large enterprise, I would be able to enforce restrictions on size but since the problem is with the one who owns the system, it becomes a bit more dicey. As I mentioned, my solution for now is using IMAP as well as iCloud and the iCloud Control Panel. Unless that ultimately crashes and burns, I think we can live with that solution. The most critical needs for this user is not his old mail but his contacts and calendar. I have tried replicating just the 1000 or contacts to a new mailbox but I start having issues with the new mailbox.

If you have continued to see issues with a new mailbox then that would tend to point the finger at the content being the source of the problem, rather than the container. I can never see the need to have 1000 contacts in a mailbox for an individual user. Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

If you have continued to see issues with a new mailbox then that would tend to point the finger at the content being the source of the problem, rather than the container. I can never see the need to have 1000 contacts in a mailbox for an individual user. Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.