Outlook/Exchange 2003: huge emails to multiple people

K

Kevin Atherton

Over the weekend, our site went a little haywire and the normal flow of
error emails quintupled, and each email was in the range of 1M to 12M in
size. I came in this morning to find 7 GIG of new mail in my mailbox and a
nastygram from our IT department saying "Clean out your email, deadbeat."

Just out of curiosity, when an email is sent to a distribution list (let's
say 30 people in the list), is only one copy saved and everyone gets a
pointer to the actual email, or does it make 30 copies of each email and put
one in each person's box?

Because of the nastygram, I'm assuming the latter is the case, but I'm just
curious.

If it matters, I'm on Windows 2003 Server using Outlook 2003 to access an
Exchange (I don't know the version) server.
 
N

neo [mvp outlook]

Exchange uses single instance storage. Therefore if 30 of you were on the
same server, Exchange stores 1 copy of the message and each mailbox gets a
link to the item. (e.g. if there are 3 exchange servers and those same 30
are spread across, then each server keeps 1 copy of the message.)

What might have went haywire (and based on your own post) is the mention of
error e-mails. Does error mean a non-delivery receipt (e.g. your message
couldn't reach user "x")? If yes, the site could have implemented
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308303 to keep the
NDR from ballooning
 
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