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 2010 OWA – Remove Cached Email Recipients/Auto Complete Entries

If you have any Active Directory users that have been deleted out but the addresses still show up in OWA or if you changed somebody’s user/email attributes and emails bounce back as undeliverable, this article is for you. I found this info here, the entries are stored in the user’s mailbox so the you can only delete them by doing one of the following:

  1. Delete an entry from the list using OWA
    1. Login to mailbox via OWA
    2. Create a new meeting request (Has to be a meeting request only!)
    3. Begin typing the entry you want to delete until you see it in the Auto Complete list
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Exchange 2010 OWA – Can’t Delete Messages

Out of nowhere today I rebooted my Exchange server (that has been up and running for several years without problems) then users could no longer delete their messages – they would just receive an unfriendly message stating that “An unexpected error occurred and your request could not be handled”. The event log showed the following error every couple of seconds:

Event 3, System.ServiceModel 3.0.0.0

WebHost failed to process a request.
 Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/20974680
 Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/EWS/Exchange.asmx' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: The type initializer for 'Microsoft.Exchange.Services.Wcf.MessageInspectorManager' threw an exception.. ---> System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for 'Microsoft.Exchange.Services.Wcf.MessageInspectorManager' threw an exception. ---> System.InvalidOperationException: Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1).
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