I'm trying to recover space in my Mailbox Store and we have the 'Recover Deleted Items' option active in Outlook. Are these items still in the database and if so how can I permanently delete them?
SnapOverflow
Yes, they take space in the database. If you hard delete them (Shift + Delete), it should delete them permanently from the database. Note that this will not reduce the size of the physical edb files.
Yes, 'recover deleted items' takes up space in the mailbox store. Reduce your keep deleted items retention period to 0 days if you want to free up the space.
Yes they are kept in the mailbox store for whatever period is specified for deleted item retention, unless users have gone into Outlook's deleted item recovery (if you have that enabled) and manually deleted there. I've never tried permanently deleting from the database end (assuming that's what you want to do) but you may find a command for it in TechNet. You may also need to run one of the database cleanup jobs and ensure all DB logs are committed.