PC Adm: Compression of External Postoffice & Gateway Mailbags (101749)

This article was previously published under Q101749

The Administrator program for versions 2.1, 3.0, and 3.2 of Microsoft Mail for PC Networks compresses the mailbags (.MBG files) that belong to external postoffices and gateways. The Compress Mailbag utility is selected by selecting Local-Admin, Storage, Compress.

This utility compresses all mailbags on the postoffice. The function does not distinguish between a user's mailbag on the postoffice, an external postoffice mailbag, or a gateway mailbag. This could cause problems if an external postoffice or a gateway is active.

The purpose of the Compress utility is to recover space from the system mailbags. The mailbags contain the headers for the mail items for the owner of the mailbag. Even though the user deletes the mail item, the header remains in the mailbag and is marked deleted. As a result, the mailbag still takes up the same amount of space. The Compress utility recovers this space.

The Compress utility of Administrator program opens the .KEY and .MBG files with READ, WRITE and DENY_WRITE file permissions. If there is an External or Gateway active, the file can still be read and this causes the External or Gateway to get data that is out of date.

For more information on the Compress utility, please see the "Managing the Mail System Disk Storage Space" section of the "Administrator's Guide."