Exchange 2003 Issue

**prleo1** · March 8th, 2005, 09:26 AM

I currently have 12 users on my Exchange server. Well, this morning, one user stated that every email that she has received since July 2004 has been dumped into her inbox. No other user has experienced this issue, yet. I have checked Event Viewer for some clues on how this would have happened, but cant figure it out. Can someone throw me a bone? Or at least, point me in the right direction?

**Bigtimbre** · March 9th, 2005, 02:34 AM

I'm not sure I fully understand your question. What do you mean the messages dumped into her in box?

**prleo1** · March 9th, 2005, 10:40 AM

Exchange 2003
Outlook 2003
When the user opened her Outlook, every email that she has received in the last year was sent as "unread" to her Inbox. She has no *.pst file and has a 600mb+ *.ost. Basically, all of her email resides on the server, but the *.ost file is mirroring her mail store on the server. I checked the storage on the server and the ost file size and they match identically. I went into Tools-Email Accounts-Change and tried to Disable Offline Folder Files, but the button is greyed out. I even unchecked Cached Exchange Mode.

I thought maybe that it was a corrupted ost file that was causing the issue. So, I shutdown Outlook, renamed the ost, and restarted. Outlook immediately started to rebuild ALL 600mb+ of the new ost. I then checked the server again; the mailbox grew to 2X the size of her original mail store - 1.2gb!!!!! So, when it rebuilt her ost, it also duplicated those emails on the server.

This is only happening to one person in my organization.

**davebdun** · March 9th, 2005, 03:22 PM

Have you tried blowing away the user's mail profile on the workstation?

**prleo1** · March 9th, 2005, 04:02 PM

Yep,
did that.

I ended up deleting the ost, wiping away the profile, recreate, then pull her email to a pst file, and turned off Cached Exchange Mode. She still has triplets of her email, but she can delete those. Unless there is any easy way to muck the db to get rid of them. My concern was that her email was 600mb+, then they started duplicating on the server, not just on her local Outlook.
The Rule of Thumb for me right now is to: turn off Cache Exchange, setup a pst to store mail instead of managing cache through ost. I ran a utility to check the consistency of the ost file; it couldnt read it. Meaning, it was corrupted.

**bbtech6650** · March 13th, 2005, 10:52 AM

sure you could do that, but no PST, no email...

Also, backup programs like Veritas will fail when doing a backup, and the user's PST is open against the server (on a share).