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I've finally found the root cause of my transaction log problem few months ago, it seems that one of the mailbox in my exchange server storage group caused this problem.

Does anyone have any suggestion of what to do to diagnose it further or perform anything that is non disruptive as it is currently running in production ?

Thanks

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Senior Systems Engineer
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    can you link to your old problem or describe further? – pablo Feb 27 '11 at 22:42
  • when the daily full backup missed just one day only this storage group with this particular mailbox out of space. – Senior Systems Engineer Feb 27 '11 at 22:45
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    I assume you're talking about http://serverfault.com/questions/229398/why-my-exchange-server-2007-transaction-log-gets-full but if your log files volume fills up after missing one backup then either that server is being used as cthulu's very own spam portal to the whole earth or the log file volume is very much incorrectly sized for the job its being asked to do. That's pretty much all there is to it imho. – Rob Moir Feb 27 '11 at 23:12
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    I should add that if its a spammer then the fact that its hitting your mail database suggests a legitimate account which has been compromised, so they can send mail as an authenticated user. – Rob Moir Feb 27 '11 at 23:20
  • LOL very good finding Robert, only this one particular mailbox which is used by the help desk team in production causing problem, whenever i moved it around to different storage group, it always grows the Transaction log until it is full and causing the whole mailbox in that particular storage group stops sending and receiving email. – Senior Systems Engineer Feb 27 '11 at 23:30
  • I am now thinking to do the following: 1. Export mbx 2. Delete Mbx 3. Create Mbx (same name and alias) 4. Import Mailbox – Senior Systems Engineer Feb 27 '11 at 23:31
  • You need to figure out why it is doing that - simply deleting and re-creating the mailbox won't help if something is generating those logs by sending email like crazy through it - because transactions hitting the mailbox is what causes the transaction logs to change. Though I suppose you could delete it then check for failed connections... – Rob Moir Feb 27 '11 at 23:33
  • How big is this Mailbox? It will by definition create transaction logs when you move the Mailbox between Mailbox Databases. How big is your log volume? It certainly sounds undersized. – Ben Pilbrow Feb 28 '11 at 00:06

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I had this problem a couple years ago on one of my 2003 Exchange servers. 1 user had an item in her outbox that was causing our logs to grow like crazy. Deleted the item and the problem disappeared. It's about that time that I lost faith in Exchange 2003...

If you don't know which mailbox is causing this, you can find out from ESM. Drill down to the logons of the mailbox store. Add the column for total ops and sort by that. You'll probably find a user with a ton of ops (like over 100). That's your culprit.

Jason Berg
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