Issue:
Mail.que is growing larger and occupying more disk space.
Cause:
This is by design and it is because of the new feature called Safetynet in Exchange 2013.
By default the safetynet hold time is 2 days, Exchange 2013 server holds 2 days mail in transport database and will purge those mails after 2 days. The mail.que file will not shrink because the space occupied by those purged mails will remain as whitespace.
Resolution:
- We can set the safetynethold time as 1 day or 12 hours or 5 min to reduce the growth rate of mail.que. Please refer the blog given in reference to understand the working of safetynet feature and how to change it using PowerShell.
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The mail.que file should be monitored on a daily basis and should be recreated to free up the disk space. Please follow the steps below to recreate the mail.que file.
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Go to Run by pressing Win + R. Type services.msc
- Pause the transport service
- Check for the messages in queue using the command Get-queue and wait till all active messages become zero.
- Once the queue becomes zero stop the transport service, move the mail.que and other files to a new folder in the same location.
- Start the transport service which will recreate the mail.que file.
- The folder which contains the old mail.que can be deleted to free up the disk space.
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Reference:
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Working of Safetynet feature
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PowerShell Command to change the Safetynetholdtime
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124151(v=exchg.160).aspx