r/exchangeserver • u/Intelligent_Desk7383 • 2d ago

Question Problem user mailbox

Where I work, we've got one employee who has been with the company something like 12 years, and receives a HIGH volume of email. We had to set his email online archiving rules to archive content every 30 days, just to make sure his 100GB email quota didn't get exceeded!

I guess this worked for years, because we pretty much forgot about him and his mailbox situation, until last week. We started getting complaints other people couldn't email him or send him meeting invites reliably without getting bounce-back errors.

When we investigated, it showed him as having about 350GB of "Recoverable Items".

Normally, I can fix that withe PowerShell command: start-managedfolderassistant -Identity "user@address.com" -HoldCleanUp

However, I seem to be unable to run it against his mailbox? Every time I try, it pauses a long time, followed by a page of error messages starting with:

Write-ErrorMessage : ||Grpc.Core.RpcException: Status(StatusCode="Unavailable", Detail="Error starting gRPC call. HttpRequestException: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

We're speaking with his boss about a need to do more of his work outside of email (such as using MS Teams chat for more of the regular updates he gets), and we can potentially copy some of his older archived mail into shared mailboxes we could set up for him. But we've got to get his mailbox back into reliable working order first. What's the next step here?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

3

u/trebuchetdoomsday 2d ago

i think that's deprecated? and the new shiny way is via New-ComplianceSearch and New-ComplianceSearchAction?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/recoverable-items-folder/clean-up-deleted-items

1

u/StrikingAccident 2d ago

Unless they have changed that command it only removes 10 messages at a time. My recommendation would be MfcMapi because you can remove at least 100 (?) at a time. It’s been a while since I used it but it got me out of a similar jam with our CEO several years ago.

1

u/Jezbod 1d ago

Do you limit the size of the emails that can be sent or received?

We do to stop mailboxes filling like this.

1

u/Intelligent_Desk7383 1d ago

Yeah... we have, I believe, a 30GB limit on size of email attachments. This guy's issue had more to do with receiving a LOT of email that could be handled some other way. (EG. Everyone he's in charge of was emailing him updates on when they went on break or returned each day, etc.)

1

u/Jezbod 1d ago

LOL, our email limit (public sector in the UK) is 20MB...it even works for people submitting planning applications.

The main problem is uncompressed images in documents.

1

u/Lee_4410 18h ago

Emails without attachments are small in size. 100 GB in use is attachments. Our email size limit is 40 MB, anything larger they need to use a file sharing tool, not email.

1

u/7amitsingh7 1h ago

350 GB of Recoverable Items is a lot. First check the mailbox retention settings and quota and see if Managed Folder Assistant is working properly. The gRPC error could also be related to connectivity or an Exchange service issue so it's better to check that before trying any database repair.

This guide may help you understand the Recoverable Items folder in Exchange Server.