Exchange duplicates

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I'm making a serious effort to improve the state of our Exchange server, a lot of which involves educating users etc but one of the area I'd look to look at is duplication. I'm fairly certain we have a decent number of duplicate emails sat on the server but I have no way to test the hypothesis.

Anyone know of a cheap/free way of finding duplicates across the entire mailstore?

I don't (at the moment) need anything which will do something with the emails once found I just need to quantify the problem.

 

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Interesting. Why do you want to (potentially) remove duplicates? With SIS (Single Instance Storage), Exchange only keeps one copy of each email and just uses pointers to it for duplicates.

 

Interesting... shows my exchange skills aren't there yet, didn't actually know that!

I'm still fairly certain we've got some storage growth as a result of duplication, people have a tendency to forward attachments round the building (I'm slowly training that out of them). As a for instance:

• User A receives email.
• User A then forwards email adding something like "for your information" to user B.
• User B forwards again with "see below" to user C.
• User C is me who then has to go round and retrain everyone in the wonders of saving the attachment to the network and just emailling a bloody link round.

 

As Zeb rightly pointed out, the issue with duplicates has been removed with the the introduction of SIS, SIS applies to emails and attach... so no need for you to worry about duplication (:

 

Ah - that's an entirely different kettle of fish. I'm not aware of anything natively that you can do in Exchange that will analyse this. You may be able to screw around with PfDavAdmin (but you could kill performance stone-dead if you started looking through the IS for individual messages without setting the correct filter, and I'm not even sure it will do what you want).

You could try using ExMerge if you have an idea of what the title of the email is and searching for that - just running an export to pst rather than export and remove. Failing that, Promodag or similar might have what you're looking for

 

Can consider using public folders?

If user A, B and C are in kind of a team, you can set it up so that the email goes into a team public folder and all B and C have to do is read the email from the public folder?

Dave

 

That's certainly a way to do collaborative working (most places I know use Public Folders for this to some extent, despite it being a nightmare to manage for Exchange Admins). The better way to do it would be via Sharepoint, but people seem reluctant to use it - despite MS threatening to pull Public Folders completely from every Exchange release since 2000.

However, I think Jos was asking about how to identify current duplicates, rather than suggesting how to implement a solution going forward - probably as some sort of stick to beat management into admitting there's a problem, right Jos? )

 

If you set limits on mailbox size, then when users run out of space, they can delete those large attachments from their mailboxes. Again, this is a user education issue, not a technology issue. If you let them know there's a problem and how to fix the problem on their own (click Size to sort, copy attachments, delete large e-mails, trash deleted items), then 95% of them will usually work with you.