Hi to all. I'm new to the forums, so apologies if this is the incorrect section for this question.A client is running an SBS-2003 with Exchange 2003. He has decided that he would like to institute a policy to delete email from a number of different Outlook folders for all mailboxes if the messages are older than a year. Seems simple enough with recipient policies. However, I just took this client on recently, and before me they were basically just surviving in the wild with no real management policies in place. In light of that, when I contacted the client to set up a test run of the recipient policy before actually going live with it, I learned that all of the people working there have taken to creating numerous subfolders under their inboxes that they put certain messages in that they want to keep closer at hand. Of course, they don't have any standard naming conventions for these folders, so every user has a different number of subfolders, with different names. The client wants to delete old emails from the inbox, but they have to leave those subfolders untouched. I know that in Exchange 2007 a recipient policy applied to the inbox will also apply to subfolders created under it, and I'm afraid the same will be true for Exchange 2003. I had tried to do a test with the clients own mailbox only, with the Generate a Report action selected, but the number of emails he had in his inbox made it difficult to tell (The report returned 600+ out of over 1900 messages, but he could not tell if any of those 600 flagged messages were from subfolders). Can anyone confirm whether or not Exchange 2003 recipient policies affect the subfolders of folders they are applied to? Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Hi, The Mailbox manager policy will only clean the folders in which is listed in the GUI and does not include subfolders. For your reference: Mailbox Manager FAQ http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/04/18/403819.aspx If you would like to know more regarding the Mailbox Manager, you can also refer to Part 1 and Part 2 in the link Thanks,Mike

There is also a good guide here on Managing Mailboxes in Exchange 2003: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Mailbox-Management.htmlHowever if your after removing old mail after a certain date then you could look at a Group Policy to specify autoarchiving?Another option if you were looking for a server side solution would be to use Exmerge to archive the mail.