Hello everyone, I'm been having an ongoing battle with my Exchange servers' STM file for the mailbox store. It has been steadily growing for many months despite my best efforts of having an archive policy in place for old mail and defragging the databases on a regular basis to clear out deleted items and reclaim that empty space in the DB. A few details: Exchange 2003 SP2, STD w/ all updates, in an Active Directory environment w/ 46 mailboxes. 38.2 GB .edb, 85.67 GB .stm I have edited the registry on that server to allow the max of 75 GB database size, but I am way over that already. I have a batch file set to run at 6am every morning to restart all Exchange Services as my server shuts down Exchange every 24 hours since I am over the limit. ALL my users use Microsoft Outlook 2003, a few on 2007. We do not use OWA. McAfee Groupshield AV and Anti-Spam solution installed on this server All users use Exchange Cached Mode and all users have an Auto-Archive policy set to archive old email after 6 months. After a full defrag (that takes nearly 14 hours), I am only able to reclaim perhaps 1-2 GB of space, sometimes 3-4. The STM file is made up of mostly attachments and mail from the internet/non-MAPI clients. While we do get a good amount of internet based mail, from what I understand is that once the message is opened in Outlook, it is converted and place into the .edb from the .stm. I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions or solutions to offer that I haven tried or looked at yet to reduce the size of the STM file significantly? One possibility, according to MS, is having an AV/anti-spam solution installed on the server. I had though that this was the solution to my problem, but McAfee states they have never had an issue with Groupshield inflating an Exchange STM file. What is left to try? I am at the point of completely blowing away the STM file and risking losing some data to start over. Sure, I could petition the boss to throw money at the problem and upgrade, but that's not a solution and my budget is zilch right now. Thanks all, Jeff

The messages only gets converted from edb to stm if opened or manipulated by a mapi client. If they continue to open the messages in Outlook using POP\IMAP it doesn't get promoted. Even if you did manipulate the items using a mapi client, your EDB gets bigger so it's a trade off. There is no point of defragging especially if you're not reclaiming significant white space which you can determine by filtering for event id 1221. You can't "reduce" the STM per se unless you are having clients cleaning up (deleting) their mailboxes. It's an active DB holding live content. You're not facing an issue per se, you're just running into a lack of mailbox quota management and sizing.James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

What bothers me is that none of our users connect using POP3 or IMAP, even those working remotely use a VPN connection and Remote Desktop to their computers or a Terminal Server (or LogMeIn) and use Outlook from there to connect to their mailbox. There's no POP or IMAP users at all, all the internet based email is incoming that gets routed to public folders (that STM file is fine). This is where I don't understand why it is always increasing. We receive attachments and some are large by email standards, such as video clips from clients and pictures from them, but these are a few MB in size. I allow up to 100MB email attachments for some of these videos our clients send but they are a few and far between. With the archiving settings in place, mailboxes are getting cleaned out regularly. Once archived, the data is moved to the local drive along with any old attachments and with retention settings set down to 7 days, this should be cleaning out the old data regularly after I defrag. I have mailbox quotas in place to not allow any mailbox to get over 2 GB. There are 4 users for whom this setting is taken off, myself (though I keep my own mailbox well under 2 GB by removing attachments) and 3 executives. When a user leaves the company, I archive their mail, delete everything permanently, mark the mailbox for deletion and purge it to recover that space. So I'm still left wondering, why is my STM file so big? It doesn't make sense. If it's live content and content is constantly being removed, the STM should remain at a manageable size.

What stm file is big the priv store or the public folder? Which one did you defrag? The stm can contain any content, when you hear that the stm contains streaming data, it doesn't mean like media content, it just means the data is streamed into the stm file.James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

There are different levels of property promotion from the .stm to the .edb. Simply opening the message in a mapi client will promote the headers to the rich text format in the edb. Modifying the message or accessing an attachment will convert the message. Full promotion from .stm to .edb also occurs if you move the mailbox to another store. The only way to tell how much free space is available in the .stm is to use Eseutil /ms. Event 1221 in the app log applies only to the edb If I wanted to start "fresh" I would move all the mailboxes to another store, which will promote all the properties in the source .stm to rich text format (edb) in the destination maibox store.

It's the private store STM that is big, not the public store. It's the private store DB's that I defrag, both files. I've thought about that too Andy, I did that migrating to this server using ExMerge years ago. Perhaps an upgrade is definitely in order but I just know they won't like the pricetag. MS does have an article on creating a new STM file and that was my other option, I'll have to find that bookmark because it does talk about file corruption and I'm wondering if there is corruption in the streaming file that is causing these issues so a "fresh start" might just be the best way to go.

Is there a possibility that this really isn't the Exchange Servers fault? It might just be that you simply have reached the limit and need to start thinking about a transition project to Exchange 2010? (just to have an accurate mindset in this troubleshooting process)Jesper Bernle | Blog: http://xchangeserver.wordpress.com

It's the private store STM that is big, not the public store. It's the private store DB's that I defrag, both files. I've thought about that too Andy, I did that migrating to this server using ExMerge years ago. Perhaps an upgrade is definitely in order but I just know they won't like the pricetag. MS does have an article on creating a new STM file and that was my other option, I'll have to find that bookmark because it does talk about file corruption and I'm wondering if there is corruption in the streaming file that is causing these issues so a "fresh start" might just be the best way to go. No, you dont want to create a new stm. the stm and edb are both needed to have a complete store. If you recreate the stm, you may have messages in mailboxes that can't be opened.

Well now I am in a huge bind now. All of the sudden, my STM file has grown 8 GB since I posted this and this morning, my server crashed as it ran out of space. I run full backups on Fridays to clear the log files, which frees up a good bit of space, but I noticed a LOT more log files being created than usual and overnight, they filled up about 4-5 GB of space. Something has to be causing this increase - we are not a large company and that is a LOT of email. I am at my wits end with what to do in the short term before purchasing a new server, getting it installed, setup and spending a whole weekend running ExMerge and migrating to a new server. Does anyone have any solutions on what to look at that is causing this STM file growth?

Okay, please have a look at How to resolve unexpected growth of EDB or/and STM Files and follow the troubleshooting steps mentioned there.Jesper Bernle | Blog: http://xchangeserver.wordpress.com

Hi Andy, There is really nothing you can do. the best this to do, is to create a new mailstore and move some of the emails you have in that maitore into this new one. Then run a defrag. that will remove any white space as a result of the move. D-Techie