Why doesn’t the age limit on the Exchange 2003 Public Folders work

exchange-2003public-folders

I have a number of public folders on our Exchange 2003 server.

The server is the only Exchange server in the organisation, it's Exchange 2003 standard SP2.

I have configured four of the public folders with an age limit of 14 days, two of the folders enforce the age limit, whereas the other two folders have items that are over a year old.

I have maintenance scheduled to run for 4 hours every day, at a time when the server is pretty much idle.

The event log shows that the process runs, but there is no evidence of any problems.

I don't have a default age limit on the public folder store, and I've configured the age limit via storage Group > Public Folder Store > Public Folder Instances.

I've searched for configuration differences between the folders that work, and those that don't and haven't managed to find anything.

Edit: Further info

When you click on 'public folder instances' in ESM, the right hand pane shows the correct 'Removed older than' date for all the folders (i.e. 14 days before today's date), but the messages in the public folders don't get purged.

Some logs from the server:

—

Event Type: Information
Event Source:   MSExchangeIS Public Store
Event Category: General 
Event ID:   1206
Date:       23/07/2009
Time:       02:15:00
User:       N/A
Computer:   STUMBLE
Description:
Starting cleanup of items past retention date for Item Recovery on database
"First Storage Group\Acme Co Public Folders".

—

Event Type: Information
Event Source:   MSExchangeIS Public Store
Event Category: General 
Event ID:   1207
Date:       23/07/2009
Time:       02:15:00
User:       N/A
Computer:   STUMBLE
Description:
Cleanup of items past retention date for Item Recovery is complete for database
"First Storage Group\Acme Co Public Folders".
Start: 3 items; 14 Kbytes
End: 1 items; 2 Kbytes

—

Best Answer

The logs you posted show that items "past retention date for Item Recovery" were purged; that's related to the "Keep deleted items" settings, not to actual item age; so I'm afraid those logs just aren't related to the issue you're experiencing.

About the actual issue: have you checked the items that are supposed to be deleted but are not? Do they actually exist, i.e. do you actually have older-than-14-days items there? Are you sure nobody touched them in the meanwhile? Last modification time is what's used to compute age, not item creation time.

And BTW, what type of public folders are those?

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