Thank you Craig for giving such a succint lucid description of the Exchange "store." I liked it so much I forwarded it to everyone in the department to read.
Paul Chinnery Network Administrator Mem Med Ctr -----Original Message----- From: Dupler, Craig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 5:36 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Size of mailbox Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a mailbox. So, in a very real sense, it consumes little if any space. Ok, what is it. The store or more accurately the two stores are two large combined storage environments. One is used to manage inherently private stuff (mailboxes) and the other is used to manage largely public stuff (public folders). Thus the priv and pub. You will often hear them referred to as "single instance stores or storage." There are several important ways to think about what is in them. Everything is only in there once. If there are two copies of something, then the second copy is either not in one of the stores, or there are multiple servers and something has been replicated due to the requirements implied by the rights (more on this below). A mailbox is a view of the contents of the two stores. A mailbox view includes the entire hierarchy of the pub store and only those items in the priv store that are assigned to the security context and "mailbox" that matches the user's current profile. One item mail may appear in every last view of every last valid profile, or it may occur in only one. That will depend on to whom it was sent, and how it was dispositioned in a particular view. If someone deletes and item, all that does is remove it from their view. It is not actually purged until it is deleted from all currently valid security contexts that have been linked into that store. As you can imagine, a fair number of cycles in the server are spent on internal processes that maintain the integrity of the store. There are sweeping and garbage collection activities. Obviously, the storage allocated to a mailbox view is at best and on a good day, only a theoretical value. It looks at the stored objects (including calendar items and journal entries) that can be seen in in that view, and sums them. Obviously, the sum of all views is many times greater than the total physical size of the two stores on the typical server. But it is a convenient way of looking at the contents, and encouraging someone to delete stuff that they don't really need. But equally obvious, if I send two people on the same server as me a message and both of them delete it, but I keep a copy in my "Sent Items" folder, nothing has been deleted and the stores do not change size. All that changed was the contents of the two recipient's views. Does that help? <snipped>_________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
