Almost certainly white space - or rather the lack of it. Look in the event viewer for event ID 1221. That will tell you how much free space there is in the database. That is what you would get back from doing an offline defrag. White space is marked when the nightly processes complete and is data that has gone past the deleted item retention period. However the Exchange database size restriction takes in to account the white space in the database, so if you have lots of white space you can go over the 75gb limit. Therefore check the deleted item retention period and turn it down. That will free the space from deleted objects quicker. If you turn it down to zero, then given the amount of data you appeared to have removed, you will see the white space in the event viewer the night after tonight. (Night 1 - the content is removed, Night 2, the white space is marked in the database). Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources

Hello all, please note that english is not my native language but I try to describe my problem as best as I can. First let me describe the enviroment, then I will explain my problem. We're talking about a Exchange 2003 SP2 Standard Edition installed on a Windows Server 2003 SP2 also Standard Edition. There are approximately 150 mailboxes on this server. There is no other Exchangeserver. My problem is the following: the size of the priv1.edb has reached the maximu size so we need to reduce the size of this database. I configured a "retention policy" to delete automatically e-mails using a "recipient policy". I configured a recipient policy with the following options: Policy applies to: all users with a exchange mailbox Inbox: delete all e-mails older then 365 days Sent items: delete all e-mails older then 365 days deleted items: delete all e-mails older then 90 days System cleanup: delete all e-mails older then 30 days all other mailfolders: delete all e-mails older then 365 days Calendar: do not touch Notes: do not touch Journal: do not touch Tasks: do not touch For safety reasons we used first the option "report only" and started the mailboxmanager process. The result was promising: [blockquote] started: 2010-12-04 18:49:17 finished: 2010-12-04 19:11:30 Processed Mailboxes: 151 Moved Messages: 0 Size of moved messages: 0,00 KB Deleted Messages: 237849 Size of deleted messages: 36878393,00 KB[/blockquote] After that, we changed the option from "report only" to "delete" (NOT "move to system cleanup"). The process was started and deleted the expected amount of old e-mails (~36 GB) . To now decrease the size of the database priv1.edb, we started a offline defragmentation of this database after the mailboxmanager process. The offline defragmentation was finished after ~8 hours. After a look at the size of the "new" database I was really amazed, because the database was only a few GB smaller as before. So I started again the mailboxmanager process to see if I misconfigured something, but I got the result that this time nothing was deleted (logical, no e-mails match the criterias). I also tried the following: rebooted the server several time reduced the values for the cleanup agent run the cleanup agent several times run a online-defragmentation run again a offline defragmentation Any ideas whats going on at this server? Where are the deleted e-mails gone? Are they really deleted and if yes, how can I now shrink the database size? If you need some more informations, just let me know. Any ideas are really appreciated! best regards Christoph