Hi All Please be patient with my explanations. Ok, lets see if I can give a full run down on the problems I am experencing @ the moment. Symptoms: My clients are able to send emails but not recieve them. My Exchange server is downloading the emails but not putting them in the users mailboxes. There are no new emails if viewed via outlook or the remote web workplace. I have tested this by turning off the exchange services, Sending an email to my company email address via my gmail account, then going onto my ISP's internet email site. The email is there and stays there till I turn on all my exchange features, and retrieve my email. When I go into the message tracking center under tools in exchange system manager and do a search I find all the "missing"emails. I removed the C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\ priv and public files (as well as log files) as a workaround to a different problem I was experiencing (would not mount my store as log files were missing) and let exchange system management re-create them. This let through several emails which were queued but I have had no new ones since. Exchange related events in my application log: InformationESE Information Store (4660) First Storage Group: Online defragmentation is beginning a full pass on database 'C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\pub1.edb'. Information Store (4660) First Storage Group: Online defragmentation has completed a full pass on database 'C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\pub1.edb'. The database "First Storage Group\Public Folder Store (SERVER01)" has 0 megabytes of free space after online defragmentation has terminated. Source MSExchangeISCategory GeneralThe Unsolicited Commercial Email default filter level has been updated. The new value is 8. Thank You In Advance for any assistance.

Sean, The events you posted are nothing more than informational events. The message tracking logs will be key here to determining what is happening with these messages. Can you search in the Message Tracking Center, and then click on one of the messages? That will pull up the details of what Exchange did with it. Post those details, and we can help you figure out where the message is.

Thank you for the reply, Some A-hole "expert" decided 2 do a audit on the server 2 see who has been surfing what on the internet, finally dragged this out of my boss after a week of screwing with this server 2 see what went wrong, this same "expert" decided 2 delete all .log files on my server so he can have a fresh start for his next audit and he decided 2 "optimise" my server while he was at it. Due to many other problems on this pc I ended up reloading it. I now have 3 of each.edb file (the originals are inconsistent so will need 2 repair, the 1's I was using as a workaround last week have all log files present but was not sending new emails to users and then the current 1's which are in perfect working order) Is there some way I can extract each users mailbox from last weeks and if I can repair the log file free 1(oldest) extract those as well? Thank you in advance Sean.

Ouch. What I would honestly recommend here is to open an incident with Exchange Support. While it would be technically possible to troubleshoot the issues you are seeing, the easiest and fastest way to resolve your issue would be to work with a support professional. I would tell your boss to bill that same "expert" for the cost of the support call. Since you reloaded the server, and from your response, it sounds like everything is working now. If this is Exchange 2003, then you can create a Recovery Storage group, and add your now working mailbox store to that. Then once the old databases (.edb and .stm files) are in a good state, you can use the Recovery Storage Group to recover e-mail back into the production mailboxes. If you are using Exchange 2000, then you have 2 options. 1 - build a recovery forest (another server with the same name, Exchange org, admin group, etc.) in a segmented network, then mount the databases on that server and use Exmerge to recover the messages. 2 - look at 3rd party products. Quest has a great tool for this called Recovery Manager for Exchange. It allows you to read directly from the offline database files (on disk or tape) and export to PST or somewhere else. I can't recommend the Quest tool as a Microsoft employee, but I have used it before I joined Microsoft, and it works great. I still would recommend to open a support case though.