Article ID: 913112 - Last Review: February 10, 2006 - Revision: 1.4

Error message when you perform a Send/Receive operation in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 on Exchange Server 2003: "You have exceeded the size limit on your mailbox"

When you perform a Send/Receive operation in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, you may receive the following error message in the Mailbox Cleanup wizard:

You have exceeded the size limit on your mailbox. You can find types of items to delete or more, empty the deleted items folder, or your can have Outlook transfer items to an archive file.

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CAUSE

This issue may occur if the following conditions are true:

You are using Outlook 2003 in Cached Exchange Mode.
Your mailbox contains corrupted items.
The mailbox is synchronized with the Offline Folder (.ost) file.

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RESOLUTION

To resolve this issue, follow these steps.

Note These steps must be performed by a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 administrator.

Create a new user account. Then, create a test mailbox for this account.
Test the test mailbox to make sure that the symptom that is described in the "Symptoms" section does not occur.
Use the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Merge tool (Exmerge.exe) to copy the mailbox that was used to perform the Send/Receive operation to a Personal Folders (.pst) file.

Note In the Exmerge log, non-fatal errors may appear. These errors indicate that the corrupted items were discovered and were either fixed or deleted by Exmerge.exe.
Use Exmerge.exe to merge the data from the .pst file into the test mailbox.

Note You have to rename the .pst file to the name that you used for the test mailbox.
Test the test mailbox again to make sure that the issue that is described in the "Symptoms" section does not occur.
Make sure that mailbox retention is enabled on the mailbox stores that contain the following mailboxes:
- The test mailbox
- The mailbox that was used to perform the Send/Receive operation
Start Exchange System Manager, and then delete the following mailboxes:
- The test mailbox
- The mailbox that was used to perform the Send/Receive operation
Run the Mailbox Cleanup Agent so that a red X appears next to both mailboxes.
Reassociate the test mailbox with the affected user account.
Make sure that the test mailbox that you reassociated with the user account in step 9 has the correct information for the alias, for SMTP addresses, and for other parameters.