Whilst recently migrating users to the new Exchange mail servers, a trend has become very apparent amongst our user community.

Background:
The mailbox move process creates a new mailbox on the new server then proceeds to copy every message individually before closing the connection and transferring which mailbox the user account points to. It’s a tedious, long-winded process, but unfortunately that is what we have to work with.

During this process the GUI/Powershell gives an indication of progress and which Outlook folder that is currently being processed. It is difficult not to notice the process trundling along and very difficult not to notice the prevalence of users with massive Deleted Items folders.

The above example is actually pretty tame. Some users have Deleted Items folders with excess of 8000 items.

EDIT

Here is an example of 8000+:

My main questions are:

• Are users aware that their Deleted Items folders are so large and takes up part of their quota?
• Are users aware that they can easily empty it or even automate the process? 2003, 2007
• Do users use e-mail in a way that necessitates having this massive log of deleted items; is it an urge to have an empty inbox, but refer to the deleted items frequently?

Of course, the reason for this blog post is purely selfish, as the mailbox moves take much longer and the mailbox databases grow much larger, however it does emphasise that folk may use e-mail in a plethora of differing ways.

This post is also a chance to refer to the post I made last year which talks about the inbuilt ‘Recover Deleted Items’ functionality of Exchange.