Configuring Mailbox Stores

Mailboxes are the delivery location for all incoming mail messages for a designated owner. A mailbox can contain messages, message attachments, folders, documents, and other files. Information in a user's mailbox is stored in a mailbox store on an Exchange server. The following figure shows a list of the mailboxes on a single mailbox store.

Mailbox store information in Exchange System Manager

Mailboxes inherit many of their properties (such as storage limits) from the mailbox store. You can create different mailbox stores for different groups of users. For example, you may put mailboxes for workers in one store and mailboxes for executives in another store, and give the executives double the normal storage limits by configuring the store instead of configuring the individual mailboxes.

This section describes the following:

• The relationship between a mailbox store and its associated public folder store.

• Single instance storage of messages (when it applies and when it does not).

• How to add a mailbox store.

• How to configure the default mailbox storage limits and the length of time that deleted items and mailboxes will be retained.

• How to control mailbox store settings with system policies.

• Interfaces to use for monitoring mailbox store activity.

For information about configuring the store for full-text indexing updates, see "Using Exchange Server 2003 Full-Text Indexing" in Working with the Exchange Server 2003 Store.