What I'm trying to accomplish is to clean out my Exchange 2003 Database and shrink the database by removing about 20 old mailboxes. I'm trying to basically export the mailboxes to .pst files and throw them on a separate hard drive. I went ahead and followed the settings in other threads for setting up permissions for my own user to access the mailboxes on the Exchange 2003. I'm not using the Administrator user because it has explicit set allow and deny by inheritance for the send as and receive as permissions. After setting everything up I went ahead and ran exmerge on a mailbox and tried to export the information. I received the following error: Error opening message store (MSEMS). Verify that the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service is running and that you have the correct permissions to log on. (0x8004011d). Here is the kicker... I actually ran it on two mailboxes and everything went through fine. When I did the other mailboxes they popped up with the error above. I checked the permissions on the working mailboxes with the ones that didn't work and they were identical. They inherited everything correctly from the permissions from AD of the server and mail store permissions as set through Exchange System Manager. I was wondering if there is another way of doing this. I spent an entire day bulling my hair out trying different things but in all I'm at a point to hear what others would suggest as trying to archive these mailboxes for future use so I can delete the AD and mailbox remanence of old users. I don't need to use exmerge unless really needing but if there is another way I'm all ears. Thanks.Bryan

You could just use Outlook since you only have a small # of users You can use a 3rd party utility like Lucid8's DigiScope http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp NOTE: Just in case you didn't know thought I would mention that ExMerge has a 2GB limitation so be careful using it since if a mailbox contains more than 2GB of data ExMerge will not tell you that you have exceeded the limit, instead it will just corrupt the PST and you wont know there is an issue until you go to open the PST.Troy Werelius www.Lucid8.com