Gather your own mailbox statistics without third party tools

by Scott Lowe MCSE | Feb 03, 2006 8:00:00 AM

Tags: Network administration, Scott Lowe MCSE, mailbox, Microsoft Exchange Server, E-mail Administration Tips Newsletter

Takeaway: Here's some Visual Basic Script code that can help you to gather important statistics about your Exchange mailbox stores.

In Prove the worth of your Exchange server, you read about the importance of making sure that you and senior management were always aware of the critical nature of your Exchange infrastructure, and you read about various tools that help you to gather various statistics about your Exchange servers. Unfortunately, many Exchange monitoring tools can cost a lot of money--often too much to be able to easily justify.

Never fear. With a little elbow grease, you can write Visual Basic Script code that can help you to gather important statistics about your Exchange mailbox stores. Suppose, for example, that you want to be able to watch the growth of your Exchange stores in a very granular way so that you can take action where appropriate. You might have a user hogging 6 GB of space on your Exchange server, for instance. Or, you might want to be able to watch storage trends so that you can anticipate what your storage needs will be for an upcoming budget request. Regardless, gathering this kind of information isn't hard!

The VB Script code below accomplishes this, plus a little more. It uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to gather various statistics about each mailbox in your Exchange store, including the mailbox name, the total size (in KB), the number of items it contains, and its status. The status is really useful if you've imposed mailbox limits on users and you want to run a report that shows who has mailboxes in the warning stage, or who is unable to send mail as a result of going over their quota. There are five possible status values:

1: Below Limit

2: Issue Warning

4: Prohibit Send

8: No Checking

16: Mailbox Disabled

The code in Listing A will do the trick! You can then open the CSV file in Excel and manipulate it to your needs.

Print/View all Posts Comments on this article

hi hiten.jshah@... | 02/06/06

Not for Exchange 2000? alex.schoenmakers@... | 02/06/06

Exchange 2003 only Scott Lowe | 02/06/06

Convert the Size from KB to MB rtibbets@... | 02/07/06

Try this... Scott Lowe | 02/07/06

which part melodyg@... | 02/13/06

null igor.pertsovsky@... | 02/13/06

updated script igor.pertsovsky@... | 02/13/06

email code igor.pertsovsky@... | 02/08/06

CHEESE Grimshiire | 02/15/06