exchange 2003 nearly out of space??

kahn

hello folks,
I'm having a problem in exchange server 2003 that is getting out of space in couple of days? my boss wants me to solve this issue. He told me that send email to every user to empty their inbox, deleted items, sent items etc to make some space? is that the solution I mean proper solution?
Any help would be really appreciated.
cheers

Claymoore

Deleting mail by itself will not solve anything. Deleting mail creates white space in the database that is recovered during an online defrag and used for future mail messages. Exchange databases never shrink on their own, they only grow. If you need to shrink the size of your mail database, you will need to perform an offline defrag with Eseutil.
How to defragment with the Eseutil utility (Eseutil.exe)

A couple of catches, though. It's an offline defrag so the mailbox database will be unusable throughout what can be a lengthy operation. You will also need free space on the disk at least equal to 110% the size of your mailbox database. If you have that much free space right now, I doubt your boss would be alarmed. Most of my designs include a maintenance LUN that can be connected to a mail server for recovery and maintenance purposes such as this.

I am assuming that when you say the server is running out of space you mean the mail database disk is filling up. If you mean the transaction log disk, you need to check your backups. An Exchange-aware backup program will tell Exchange that a backup is complete and Exchange will truncate the logs. If you mean that you are about to hit the 16GB database limit of Exchange 2003 standard, then you can increase that limit with SP2 and a registry tweak.
How to increase the Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 18-gigabyte database size limit