Question : GroupWise mail volume not freeing up space recovered from deleted accounts

 Our GroupWise system is 6.5.4, running on a Novell 6.5 SP3 server.  The mail resides on a Vol1 volume, which is 132 gb in size and uncompressed.  I inherited this system several months ago as part of a new job.  I have been in the process of deleting old GroupWise accounts and their NDS objects to free up some space on the mail's volume.  It has been consistently running at between 92-95 % full.
  After removing the old accts., running the GWCheck with the "reduce" option and having corporate run a rebuild of the database(s), I am not getting any freed-up space returned to me.
  Has anyone seen this problem?  Any suggestions on what to look at beyond the GWCheck and rebuilds?

Answer : GroupWise mail volume not freeing up space recovered from deleted accounts

Lest I seem harsh, thank you for mentioning the exact versions of the software.

I suspect that the reason you're not seeing dramatic drops in disk space consumption is due to the efficient nature of the GroupWise message stores.

For example, if you send a message to, say, 20 other users, and you attach, say, a 10 MB file to the E-mail, then the total storage requirement will be around 10 MB (on a per-Post Office basis; I'm assuming you have a single Post Office).

If the sender's account is subsequently deleted, the space consumed is not made available unless and until either:

a) ALL of the recipients in the Post Office delete the message

OR

b) ALL of the recpients in the Post Office are themselves deleted

OR

c) some combination which deletes all copies of the message from the Message Store

So while you may have deleted some old accounts, you may not have actually freed much disk space when it comes to messages sent by those accounts that were distributed, in whole or part, internally.