Switching mailboxes for datafiles

[Guest]

Our NT network currently has an exchange 5.5 server to handle mail. Clients all have Office 2003 installed with outlook 2003 (of course)

Lately, several people have complained about hitting the famous 2 gig limit. Rather than deleting a whole bunch of mails they would like their boxes bigger. This, of course, is one of Outlook 2003s big features

Being the sysadmin, I've looked around to find out how to easily get these mailheavy users migrated to unicode mailboxes, but haven't found a good way. We're upgrading to exchange 2003 in a few months but I need a fix in the meantime. My first idea was to have users create a unicode pst datafile, and simply move all the mail there and remove the old mailbox. But I cant seem to remove it. How do I convert a mailbox that gets downloaded from exchange into non-unicode format, into unicode
One way is to just create a unicode datafile and run it parallel to the mailbox and have all mail moved there, but thats an "ugly" sollution.
Can anyone give me some pointers in the right direction? The documentation on microsofts page would only be useful if they specified if all those sollutions they suggest are even possible under exchange 5.5.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You can't convert an ansi-pst to a unicode-pst. If I understand correctly
from your issue is that mail gets deliverd from the Exchange server to a
ansi-pst-file and you want them to use a unicode-pst-file? So we have the
following setup at the moment;

Exchange 5.5 mailbox
ansi-pst-file as the default delivery location
unicode pst-file

This means you are not storing mail on the Exchange server. Correct?

What you must do then is set the unicode pst-file as the default delivery
location. You can change this in Outlook by Tools-> E-mail Accounts-> Next->
at the bottom

Now when you restart Outlook all mail gets delivered to the
unicode-pst-file. Move all your mail from the ansi-file to the unicode-file
and you can dlete the ansi-file.

Please post back to the group if you have more questions on this or have a
different setup as described.
--
Roady [MVP]
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