Exchange 2010 SP2 - How to Delete items by size?

[xendrome]

So in Exchange 2003 you could setup a retention policy to delete items from "Inbox" after "365" days over "X" KB size.

Exchange 2010 you can configure to delete only after "X" number of days, using Tags on retention policies, using ESM or Powershell. But I cannot find ANYWHERE that states how to do this with sizes.

Basically I want to purge e-mails in every users sent items folder over that is 365 days old, and over 5000KB. 99.999% of these e-mails are them sending pictures/zip files that they still have access to locally.

Any ideas guys?

[sc302 Veteran]

I have nothing for you here.

[xendrome]

I have nothing for you here.

It seems like the functionality to do it by size has been removed, even from Exchange Power Shell. Unless I am missing something totally.

[Dashel]

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of folder based lifecycle and discovery? Surely there are better ways to clean up user mailboxes.

[Mando]

you considered Symantec Vault? nice way to offload archived & inbox stuff (de-dup etc etc) retension policies etc, still at the hands of the end user but not in your exchange ;) worth every ?

[Dashel]

The built in tools are better than EV in most cases without the cost or hassle.

[sc302 Veteran]

Barracuda message archiver.

https://www.barracud...messagearchiver

Higher models support the ability to add iscsi capable storage for offloading old mail that need to stay around. Not all built in tools are better, and the built in tools will not hold up to a court case.

[xendrome]

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of folder based lifecycle and discovery? Surely there are better ways to clean up user mailboxes.

I don't require any of that, as we use a "Journal Recipient" folder that captures all inbound and outbound messages. Each month that "Journal Recipient" is exported to PST and stored online on NAS and offline (2) copies DVD. I can currently go back and review any e-mail from 2005 to current if necessary for discovery or public records laws.

And I really don't want to worry about some 3rd party app to do something that was a simple function in Exchange 2003 either. I know I can do a search of all user mailboxes and delete content based on "Subject" or "Body" so there has to be a way to do it based on "Size" as well one would think, I will have to do some more research on the "Search-Mailbox" cmdlet I guess.

[Dashel]

Well, while you might not require it, that was a driving force for that change I believe. Its pretty useless to have a retention (as opposed to recipient) policy that is swiss cheese.

Pretty sure there is no size in Search-Mailbox either. The assumption with the new DB layout is that storage is cheap and available so the 'size' of items isn't given much thought. As is the notion that admins should be tasked with cleaning up user mailboxes.

[Mando]

The built in tools are better than EV in most cases without the cost or hassle.

Clearly thats true cos, your asking about it on a forum yet it cannot do what your asking mate (thats a bit of a hassle is it not?)......I also can recover mail from as far back as 1999 (infact users themselves can, de-dup is also automatic as a feature) not to mention the "vault" being pretty much transparent to the user, freeing myself up to tackle real IT issues,

Knowing that EV is set n forget and empowers my users to look & recover themselves (for data retention laws & IP in Biomedical pharma industry) without really needing the senior infra engineer or my teams involvement for a task thats not "really" an IT task.

EV is worth every penny, freeing myself and the team to do more value added tasks for the global business.

How many man hours of investigating & actually retrieving this data/configging (and of course when the brown stuff hits the fan, shock horror not having that saved email they needed to stop a multimillion ? IP dispute/migitation case) equates to the cost of EV? (a drop in the ocean) thats how I justified it to the board of IT execs.

I dont need to tell you our game is mainly Mitigation of risk as much as providing support in the electronic workplace.

[Dashel]

At this stage, EV only makes sense if you are archiving multiple data storage types beyond just email. Setting it up just for Exchange is overkill unless you need some of their specialized discovery items (as you note). The OP wanted to reduce store size, not add journaling. Using EV to only move data out of the primary Stores to save disk space is retarded.

It was good maybe ten years ago. If that is your primary want, there are several appliances that are a much better fit for the majority of organizations today.