MWI - MAPI Logon for Exchange - Inbox or Whole Mailbox?

[stu.packett]

Unity 4.1.1

Exchange 2003 SP1 off box

I'm reading through the MWI Troubleshooting guide at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/prod_troubleshooting_guide_chapter09186a0080449da1.html#wp1137668 and read the part of "Restarting the Unity Server Causes MWI Delay".

For me, my daily scheduled MWI syncs take about 70 minutes to complete for about 570 mailboxes. A lot of my Exchange users have mailboxes over 2GB in size. My question is, does the "MAPI logon to all subscriber mailboxes" (per text) login and only check each user's Inbox or the whole mailbox?

I'm trying to find ways to cut down the Exchange mailbox sizes and need to know if I should focus only on the Inbox or the entire mailbox. Of course, the entire mailbox would be ideal, but not always possible unless I have a good reason for it.

[lindborg]

The Unity notification processes only care about events relating to the inbox and, of course, only have access to the inbox and deleted items folders. The inbox is indexed for content such that the conversations run a bit quicker when you log in to check messages and such. However, the MAPI login process is independant of this and the size of the inbox doesn't have much to do with the login (authentication) time for Exchange I don't believe.

The size of the inbox will certainly make it take longer to get a query back from Exchange on the state of the inbox - the total size is what matters there. But the indexed views added and kept up to date in the background by Exchange should mitigate most of that (i.e. we aren't asking Exchange to do a scratch recalculation of the inbox contents on the fly every time). But certainly huge inboxes are going to slow that indexing and query process down.