I have an issue with the mailstores hosting our Exchange journal mailboxes. The journal mailboxes are receiving journal mail items just fine and our archiving solution is pulling them out quickly as expected. But, just in the last week our journal mailstores have begun growing. To review: - The .edb and .stm files are both growing large. - The only mailboxes on these mailstores, the journal mailboxes, are remaining small. - Circular logging is turning on and always has been and the logs are not growing. - No known changes to the environment in terms of installations, patches, etc. It is as if Exchange is not reusing whitespace or something. The edb are just growing and growing. It will crash our mailstores again in a few days and I'll be force to move mailboxes around, dismount mailstores, delete the edb, stm files remount a blank mailstore and move the mailbox back. But I just did that a few days ago and the issue is occurring again. What could cause this growth in spite of the mailboxes not growing? Thanks for any help, Jeff

Hello Jeff, How do you control mails inside journal mailbox? Is there any mailbox manager policy applied to delete mails automatically after certain days? If not set it and if it is already set thendecrease the days. How to use recipient policies to control mailboxes in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319188 Did you set retention period for deleted mail items? If it is getting archived regularly then you can set it to 1 or 0 days. Check and make sure that Online Maintenance is enabled on the mailbox database. By default it is scheduled from 12:00 midnight to 5:00 A.M. You can also increase it from 10:00PM to 7:00AM. Do you get an event 1221 in the application event log? Which indicates the amount of white space available in the database and you can determine the growth based on that. Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server information store maintenance and online defragmentation http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324358 Do you have any file level antivirus running on the server? Then make sure that proper exclusion is set. Recommendations for troubleshooting an Exchange Server computer with antivirus software installed http://support.microsoft.com/kb/245822 Check these articles for detailed discussion about online maintenance. http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com/search?q=EDB+and+STM+files+grow+continually