Managing Mailboxes Using Mailbox Manager
In addition to generating and assigning addresses to recipients, recipient policies can be used to manage mailboxes using Exchange Mailbox Manager. Mailbox Manager sets age and size limits for messages, and then it finds and processes messages that exceed those limits.
There is no default policy that enforces age or size limits for messages. When you create the first such policy, the default limits of 30 days and 1,024 kilobytes (KB) are applied to every folder in a mailbox. A message must exceed both limits before Mailbox Manager will process it. Under the default settings, a 500-KB message will never be processed, regardless of how old it is.
Before Mailbox Manager will run, you must start the mailbox management process on the server object in Exchange System Manager. To start the mailbox management process, you use the Mailbox Management tab of the Properties dialog box for the server object. For more information, see "Scheduling Mailbox Manager Processes."
Starting the mailbox management process
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What occurs when Mailbox Manager processes a message depends on the setting that you select when creating the policy. By default, only a report is generated. No additional action is taken. In addition to the default setting, there are three other options for how Mailbox Manager processes messages that exceed the specified limits. The following table describes all four of these Mailbox Manager options.
Mailbox Manager options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
Generate report only (default) |
No messages are moved or deleted, but an administrator report is generated that indicates which mailboxes contain items that exceed the limits defined by the mailbox recipient policy. |
Move to Deleted Items folder |
Messages are moved to the Deleted Items folder in each client mailbox. Messages are handled as if deleted by the client. Users can remove them from the Deleted Items folder if they want to. |
Move to System Cleanup folders |
A partial replica of the folder hierarchy of the mailbox is created under a root folder named System Cleanup. Affected messages are moved to the appropriate subfolder of the System Cleanup folder. This feature gives users a way to recover recently deleted items, without losing information about the original folder location of the items. |
Delete immediately |
Messages are immediately deleted from client view without being moved to either the Deleted Items or System Cleanup folder. |
You can use the same limits for every folder that the mailbox recipient policy applies to, or set custom limits on a folder-by-folder basis. Each folder must be configured individually if its limits differ from the default limits.