We have several large mailboxes - 50GB plus - which users need to search. These mailboxes are enterprise drop boxes. Outlook 2003, using Advanced Find, falls short while searching the subject lines in the mailbox; to have a reliable result set you must supply the entire subject line. We are reviewing third-party archive solutions that intergrate with Outlook and provide eDiscovery features but this will take some time. In the meantime does any know if we can use Windows Desktop Search or Google Search to crawl the the edb and stm? Thanks, TomTom Morris

Hi Tom, I want to verify some information about your issue. Do you mean the mailbox size is 50GB plus, not the database? About the exchange 2003 search information, refer to below: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232132.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2005/07/22/408103.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998388(EXCHG.65).aspx Have you tested to access the mailbox with owa or outlook2003 online mode? Your mailbox is so big, maybe some third party tool could do better. Regards! Gavin TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

You cannot use windows desktop and Google search to search content from mailbox resides in mailbox. If your server have sufficient resource then exchange self search will work, but yes for bigger size mailbox it will take time. Exchange 2010 has come up with new discover feature which help for fast search. I will advise you to talk with some venders like quest for Exchange 2003. Anil MCC 2011,ITIL V3,MCSA 2003,MCTS 2010, My Blog : http://messagingschool.wordpress.com