The Exchange Mailbox Manager, Part 1

Mailbox sizes are steadily growing—increasing from the 25MB that administrators typically allocated to users in the mid-1990s to today's average of 200MB. Not only do you have to deal with increasingly large mailboxes, you must also deal with the demands of other interested parties, such as HR or your company's legal department. If you aren't already, you'll soon be up to your elbows in compliance requirements. And that means you need the best tools available to manage your users' mailboxes.

The Mailbox Manager utility, which Microsoft first introduced in Exchange Server 5.5 Service Pack 3 (SP3), lets you clean up users' mailboxes by deleting and moving items. Since then, the company has rewritten Mailbox Manager's original Messaging API (MAPI) code to use ADO and OLE DB, integrated the Mailbox Manager GUI into Exchange System Manager (ESM), and re-engineered the utility's code so that it runs as a thread within the Exchange System Attendant. Microsoft shipped the upgraded Mailbox Manager with Exchange 2000 Server SP1 and has gradually improved it in subsequent service packs and in Exchange Server 2003. An out-of-the-box tool such as Mailbox Manager is simpler in scope and capabilities than third-party products, but it can be a good first step to managing user mailboxes on an Exchange server. To get started, let's look at how you begin by creating Exchange recipient policies to manage how Mailbox Manager works within your organization. . . .