Exchange Server 2010 – Purge the Deleted Items (RecoverableItems) Folder

Being the devoted Email Administrator that you are, you notice that the space for storing mailboxes on your Exchange Server is getting dangerously low, so you decide to take action. Logically, your first thought would be to have all your end users go through all the folders in their mailbox and get rid of any junk they don’t need and then empty their “Deleted Items” folder to regain the space back. After all, in most cases there really is no reason for users to keep every single email they’ve ever sent and received since the beginning of time (which a lot of them tend to do and I’ll never understand why).

Unfortunately, as you’ve probably already noticed, that is not the case. Simply having a user empty their “Deleted Items” folder has no effect on the database size whatsoever. This is partially due to the nifty feature that allows users to be able to recover deleted messages after they’ve already emptied their trash. By default, Exchange keeps deleted items for 14 days until they are purged, so now it is necessary to manually force the deletion of these items.
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Exchange Server 2010 – Get a List of Mailboxes by Size

In the Exchange Management Shell, to get a simple list of mailboxes sorted by size, in descending order:

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -descending | ft DisplayName,TotalItemSize -autosize

Now let’s dig a little deeper and show each mailbox’s storage quota limit status and display the total count of email messages as well:

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -descending | ft DisplayName,StorageLimitStatus,ItemCount,TotalItemSize -autosize

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