[newbe]

Hi, this is the first time that i've posted here... or anywhere, so lets give it a go. About 8 months ago I got hired on at a company that had previously not had an in house IT staff. They had used an outside company for years, and then moved to...

Hi, this is the first time that i've posted here... or anywhere, so lets give it a go.
About 8 months ago I got hired on at a company that had previously not had an in house IT staff. They had used an outside company for years, and then moved to another company about 6 months before I came on board.

We have an Exchange 2000 server running on Windows 2000, fully updated and patched systems.
Normally, this server runs quite fine. It's only function is Exchange and a backup of itself at night. There are separate servers here for other functions, a windows 2000 File server and Database server, and the recent replacement of the Terminal Server (used to be a 2000) with a Windows 2003 R2 Terminal Server. Again, its only function is Terminal Services for roughly about 50 users.

Mail here has been flakey, even though Exchange reports no problems, on and off since i got here, I cleaned up the server somewhat and fixed whatever problems were reported in the EV. But every once in a while, clients lose connection with the Exchange server, not all clients either. At the same time, no clients can connect either. The office is about half and half, thin clients/Desktops. We do not use Cached mode. Also, every once in a while we get a failed message with a report back that relay is not allowed, or temporarily unable to deliver, or better yet, an internal email being routed outside, to our outside POP3 accounts, just to be asked to route back to our server. We do not have the MX record set to our server, it is set to the outside pop3 system and our clients connect to both the Exchange and POP3 account.

Here's the rub, this and other strange, small inconvenient weirdo things, told me that the database was either corrupt or approaching max size however the server reports in EV that after online defragmentation, the Priv1.edb has 2167mb of free space...I figured it must be a corrupt database.

I spent alot of time trying to find the corruption, tools, to manual inspection of emails, to reducing mailbox sizes, you name it. The problem still exists.
I recently thought, what the heck, i'll see what the physical size of the database file, actually is. a whopping 28.3 GB . From within Exchange manager, i actually add up the KB size of each mailbox, and it totals 32.10 GB.

I just about had a heart attack. Yet, the store has not been dismounted, has not reported an error, has not reported any issues whatsoever. I realize that the white space may account for some of it... but over 12GB of white space???

Got any ideas how this previous company could have manipulated this server, to allow that size of a database?? What can I do to fix it? i'm almost convinced that this is the source of our wierdo troubles here.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.