What Corporate Email Limits Do You Have? 501
roundisfunny wonders: "We currently do not have any mailbox restrictions for our Exchange users - which has led us to have a 420 GB mail store for 320 users. Our largest mailbox has over 13 GB in it. One of the main concerns for us is the time it takes for a restore. We have encouraged archiving, but now have 250 GB of .pst files. What sort of limitations does your company have on mailbox size, amount of time you can keep mail, and archives? Please mention your email platform, type of business, and number of users."
For God's sake (Score:5, Insightful)
My other suggestion is to register everybody a Gmail account for personal use and then have a special talk with the biggest inbox abusers.
P.S. You didn't mention your "type of business." That woulda helped us elvaluate your situation a bit better.
Re:For God's sake (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish I could come up with a better way to store it, but everything I have tried makes our owner throw a fit, so it goes back to the only part of the computer she knows how to work... Her email.
Re:For God's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
1st Question: What resolution are the photos at?
2nd Question: What compression?
I have a pal in real estate who invested mucho dinero on a bangin comp and camera because it was "so" necessary to have when showing off a piece of property. One day, he gets a hold of me to look at his very laggy computer and I find thousands of photos of houses (about 25 per house with one being labeled -Final- each) each photo at some insane resolution of 2048.
I asked him what he needed such high-res photos of the houses for and he said "I need the best photo possible when advertising." I asked him to show me a sample of the advertisement and, no kidding here, he popped out a magazine with a few of the houses at 3"x3".
So we filtered out what photos he wanted to keep, archived the old/irrelevant ones (just used winrar), and set his camera to default to 800.
Sure enough, we freed up about 30GB (then defragged for the sake of his VirtMem)
Education (Score:2)
Anyway, a lot of people only understand how to do three things on a computer. Office, simple web browsing, and Email. They don't know how to send files with the first two, but they sure know how to with the third. If you were to implement some sort of ftp server they can exchange large files on (and promote it), that would most likely take care of the biggest files. Also, a lot of people don't even realize how big a file is. T
Re:Education (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Education (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Education (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps the "inappropriate" remark was based on the presumption that it's not a very good idea to allow your user base to access free mail services from inside your network, let alone encouraging them to do it. After all most businesses are a bit shy about having totally uncontrolled conduits for data flowing into and out of the network, no?
I could see simply helpi
Re:Education (Score:5, Informative)
You may also find that some companies block access to external email sites like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc... My employer found that most of the infections on the network were related to content from outside email services so their solution was to keep people from accessing them. People could forward messages from home if needed and the messages would still go through the regular virus scans/checks/etc.... While the policy can be pretty annoying at times, people have adjusted to the policy.
As for email limits, I believe ours is set around 43MB on the Exchange server. We do have local files (stored on a network drive) that are not subject to the size rule on the email server, but are addressed by a corporate policy (which I would guess most people likely break). We also have a retention policy of 90 days for messages unless a user moves it to their personal files (.pst).
File servers for in-house; ftp/web for external (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For God's sake (Score:2, Redundant)
Using GMail would be bad for a few reasons- one, it is unprof. to have a free email account for business purposes. And, once again, regulations may require them to keep emails indefinately, and as such they may want/need control over the server.
Re:For God's sake (Score:2)
In cases where email is required to be saved for legal reasons, this almost always done at the mail server administrative end, not the end user end. It is done by archiving back-ups of the entire system.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Informative)
All means all. Audit requirements may mean absolutely no outbound or inbound e-mail that does not go through the corporate e-mail system for whatever compliance or confidentiality reasons there may be.
There is also the risk of letting something viral in via webmail. It may have got in via the corporate system anyway but this doesn't matter. You have an expectation of
Re:For God's sake (Score:2)
But you still couldn't allow any other e-mail client (regardless of how restricted it was, although that then opens another can of worms about how you can demonstrate compliance with whatever standard you had on all devices attached to your network). You want to make sure that nobody can e-mail out any information that isn't recorded by your corporate systems (or information in, for that
Re:For God's sake (Score:2)
You make a very important point however- It is impossible to give cogent advice without knowing what type of business the GP works in, and the regulations that go along with it.
I believe it... (Score:2)
The ones at 10+ gigs probably - like I said - are on distribution lists and aren't deleting attachments.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:For God's sake (Score:2)
mail they reply to (like removing useless
I think office jobs are all about writing mails and discussing them by phone (note: over-simplification here)
One day a co-worker announced his 1000 unread mail...
Re:For God's sake (Score:5, Interesting)
It contained every single version of a set of documents involved in a project (I think some 1.000+ documents) nicely zipped in a single file. Not sure just how long it took to send or receive, but our mailserver was set up not to reject anything, except for a complete lack of diskspace.
It made me rethink the need for storage space in our company.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, it's been a bit of a learning curve for them, and they already have suffered that for email, so it takes some time.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience, significant quantities of your mail will be made up by movies & pictures being mailed around - it's risky to remove this carte blanche because some can actually be business related.
The second worst abusers are marketing and accounting staff. Not so much the volume of mail but the large attachments they tend to exchange, like monthly reconciliation spreadsheets, printing proofs, etc. The good news is handling these guy
Easy enough (Score:3, Informative)
--LWM
Re:For God's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
"Email is not a filesystem".
Put it on a network share and point everyone to it.
If they are outside the company, then that may be an exception, or put it in a blind anonymous FTP area that gets swept once a week.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of users, small mailboxes (Score:3, Informative)
from an email hog.... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a management consultant (sorry sorry sorry), and my email box often hits the limit within days or weeks of arriving at a new client. It is annoying as anything, and it's an early sign of a poorly run stupid-rules-based IT shop.
I've seen people delete unread and unanswered emails just so that they can respond to a more urgent one.
I've dealt with people who could seldom send email as their limits were always exceeded, and they didn't know what to do
I've seen people adopt the only solution they can - archiving their email to their laptop HDD - not a great place to leave your only copy of your crucial business info.
I've (sadly) written PPT preentations and spreadsheets that are to big to email versus the internal limits. zipped.
Why do people want to keep all their emails?
- I am not a lawyer, nor do I (I hope) write emails that are legaly dubious.
- I want to keep records of all my business transactions - so my non spam non trivial email is not deleted.
- Spotlight/google desktop are great for finding those old, vital emails. no need to sort them
How can emails get so big?
Some organisations have a 'send the link, not the file' policy. Depressingly few however. Where this doesn't work then my inbox rapidly fills up with all sorts of (mainly MS Office) binaries.
When working on a important document there will be multiple versions flying around. Keeping older versions is important, as you can see who did what and when.
Spreadsheets and datasets are getting bigger - many of my key spreadsheets are over 10mb.
Pictures, movies and sound are increasingly part of everything we do, e.g. powerpoint presentatons (yes I can't stand powerpoint, but people do use it)
Zipping is a pain.
What should IT do?
I advocate nagging at certain points, but not a set limit.
Some users are data people, and they are sending around big datasets, be it on spreadsheets or otherwise. Get to know them, work with them but for goodness sakes help them as they are vital to the company. Whatever you do don't stop them from doing their stuff without implementing a better solution. (can you hear the voice of experience?)
follow your company's archive rule, but don't forget to check those laptops....
Re:from an email hog.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real problem is that you (and lots of other people) are using an email system to do something it simply wasn't designed for, and it's a strain for the users, the administrators, and often for the server too.
Often what is required is an information management system, where you can store and exchange information with others, and which will tell you when new information arrives which is relevant to you.
That may sound like email, but there are some very basic differences. Imagine you email somebody a document, they change it and send it back. You've now got two separate instances. Do that a few times, and things get messy; it would be better if you had a single instance which could be changed. You could see who changed what, and when.
How do you sort your information? Maybe by date, or by name or subject. What if you want to sort by sales region and by partner account? Email isn't that extensible, but an info management system will do that. You can generally go further and have whole virtual folder trees that will let you find the information you want much more easily. Email normally only has fixed folders. Some email clients have virtual folders that are search results, but that's not the same thing and it's not as fast (doesn't scale).
A decent information management system will also define who can see what, and when (for information that has a lifecycle), and will be accessible in all the same places that the email server is. That means that partners or clients can have controlled access to data on your server that is related to them, and may be permitted to change or add information. This removes much of the need for email, although you can have the system email you when someone changes or adds something.
Once you have started working with such a system, everything suddenly becomes much more coordinated, and you leave email to do what it was supposed to do - be an electronic replacement for posting something.
-- Steve
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you could avoid the costly training, and buy a $200 400 gB drive and double your disk space overnight and focus on other stuff, like making great products for instance.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Person A sends 10 MB spreadsheet to B, C, D, E and F
... (and so on)
Person C make one line edit, sends back to A, B, D, E and F
Person D changes a single letter typo, sends to A, B C, E and F
Person A, B, C, D, E and F never delete old email, "just in case they need it one day"
its hard to imagine 320 knowledgeable computer users having 420GB of work email, its very easy to imagine 310 luddites having 418GB of redund
Re:For God's sake (Score:2)
Re:For God's sake (Score:2)
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Informative)
Nope (Score:2)
The worst part about attachment management is calendar attachments as far as I'm concerned though. One 5 MB attachment sent out to 100 people created 100 problems. What do you mean my calendar is too big?
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
For the non-Exchange tech speakers, SIS stands for Single Instance Storage and applies to messages and attachments in Exchange. Exchange tries to be smart about storing messages and attachments by storing only a single copy of an email no matter how many people it is sent to. All the messages or attachments are really just references back to the original message/attachment. As stated above, it breaks down across storage groups, but does save quite a bit of space in each storage group.
Re:Nope (Score:3, Funny)
I do think you'll find that exchange uses SIS to limit the number of replications of a particular message, not it's attachemnts. Changing this would be a welcome change, but for now forwarding = new message = replication.
As stated, SIS does limit this to 1 instance per message per storage gr
Our setup (Score:5, Funny)
Type of Business: Work from Home
Number of Users: 1
E-Mail Platform: GMail
Business Limits (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I was admin it was 50 users, Exchange 2000 and the biggest e-mail boxes were 2 Gb or so.
This is actually a simple issue, if you look at it from a business perspective.
E-mail is a mission-critical service in most businesses. If e-mail stops, lots of places will grind to a halt. So, it needs to be treated with the appropriate respect and budget.
Get all the costs necessary for a proper setup: RAID-5 or RAID-10 SCSI, or maybe a SAN. Proper backup, either e-Vaulting or automated tape with weekly off-site rotation (GFS scheme). You might want to consider redundant equipment for a warm stand-by. Price all that out and give it to management, then limit them to what management will pay for since much of your cost will be dictated by Gb.
While 500 Gb IDE drives may be cheap, a corresponding RAID array of server-class SCSI drives isn't and proper tape storage is also not cheap. Let business necessities provide the answers here.
-Charles
Re:Business Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: SATA (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually during the rebuild is the time the next drive is *most likely* to fail, since it's usually the first time for quite a while every part of every disk gets touched.
Anyone using SATA disks that aren't configured in either a RAID6 or RAID10 is playing with fire. The risk increases dramatically with the number of disks. Anyone with an array holding critical data with 8 or more disks that isn'
Storage limits and mailbox management (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Storage limits and mailbox management (Score:2)
In my opinion, whoever established that policy for your company is a friggin' idiot.
I have been in the emp
Re:Storage limits and mailbox management (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail is not a good correspondence/document storage system, but it works for most ordinary human beings. So they use it for that. And taking away that functionality is counteproductive to the needs of the actual system users.
sPh
Re:Storage limits and mailbox management (Score:5, Insightful)
Trouble is there isn't one.
You wouldn't think of keeping all of your snail mail in a single box.
Actually, if I had a simple, automatic way of copying the entire thing and searching it, I most certainly would.
Contrary to common belief, users don't use their email as a universal archive to annoy IT departments, they do it because they don't have a better option. The reason they don't have a better option, is graphically demonstrated from the numerous replies in this forum suggesting things like "FTP" and "CVS" as suitable alternatives.
10,000+ mailboxes (Score:4, Interesting)
This November, we have a new rule in place where no e-mail older than a year will be saved. It'll be purged from backups and everything. Interestingly enough, this is primarily being done for legal reasons, not technical.
Of course, the thought is that all those documents will then be put on our resource servers or local hard drives. Lawyers are getting smart enough to sopena everything, not just e-mail.
Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:2)
I do agree with you, though, that having to restore an entire Exchange
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm...none the I'm aware of. Exchange is not a "mail system". The mail in Exchange is just a component of the GROUPWARE SUITE.
Yes, lots of you can do just fine with email and email only. Lost of you can do just fine "archiving" to your local hard drive, and not having group scheduling, or shared contacts. But in many parts of the real world, we IT folk configure tools for users that empower them to do what it is that they
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh, you picked the wrong day to say that. After my mailserver had weird problems over the weekend (of the 'Cyrus sucking down 100% CPU time in index_checkseen while making no system calls' variety), I ran a reconstruct...which took two and a half hours. (Thankfully, it did fix the problem.)
The episode w
None. (Score:2)
Re:None. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:None. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the company directors responsibilty that your users didn't add their emails to the archive, not the employees.
don't waste your time (Score:5, Insightful)
You will be better served if you breakdown usage by department and bill them accordingly. That is disk space, backup tapes, off-site storage, salaries, and so forth. Even if no money changes hands between departments, putting a cost to it is more likely to get someone to (re)act.
I'm not saying that a "let's delete old files" campaign won't work, but the ones who are most likely to do something (the engineers) are not the ones eating most of the space.
- doug
That said... (Score:2)
- When someone hits the 'reply' button to an email with a big attachment, unless they have modified it, they should delete it if their client re-attached it again. I can't even count how many times this has resulted in tons of wasted space from people spawning a giant thread off of some
- Encourage sharing of documents via a corperate file server, instead of email. Rather than emailing the f
Re:That said... (Score:5, Insightful)
Limiting attachment sizes seems to curb the worst of the problems... but a lot of non-technical people will scream and kick about having to upload files to a server. When you explain to them that email storage is extremely, extremely expensive (because it has to be hyper-reliable), and website storage can be very cheap, they're often more accommodating. And you can usually automate it fairly well with a good client, like VanDyke's stuff.
I usually offer to set up a cron job to wipe a web transfer directory every day... this means the user doesn't need to remove the files they've uploaded. (so they don't give today's files to tomorrow's recipient by accident.) Some people like that: some people don't. Some want both a temporary and a permanent site, which is easy to set up.
Routine external-user password changes are a very good idea in this kind of setup. Fortunately, it's easy to script. It can run with the file-wipe.... autogenerate a new http auth password for the day and email it to the user. If there were no files to wipe, don't make a new password.
Whatever they like is cool with me, as long as they don't use Exchange for file storage.
Re:That said... (Score:2)
why not detatch the attachments, save them on a file or web server, insert a URL into the email, and require the user to enter their email password in order to download the attachment over html?
this way people get what they want - the email system can send attachments, and the admins get what they want - the email system doesn't have to archive attachments.
IBMr (Score:5, Interesting)
You can receive email so that you don't upset customers with a "this user has hit their email limit" message but you are unable to respond to anything. Archiving is always the solution to this problem.
We also have a tool, MyAttachments, which downloads any attachments to a mini database so that it doesn't take up space on the email server.
If you ask me, you need to start putting some restrictions on people. 13GB is way too much stuff to have in your email box. I don't care if you have the past 6 years of email worth there, have them archive that stuff ASAP.
If you're going to be ultra liberal with your limits, do a 1GB limit. I think that's more manageable then what you have in place now. If you want to be ultra conservative, bring it down to 250MB, which should be more than enough for anyone doing normal emailing.
I guess the one thing you left out was what type of business is using this much space. Valve (gaming company) was sending their uncompiled Half-Life 2 code through their email server. Well, needless-to-say, their server was hacked and the code was compromised. Might want to think about that when you allow them to have such huge mail files. :
Re:IBMr (Score:2)
Re:IBMr (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, in my company, Notes was used for *nothing* except email. There were only a tiny handful of databases built by the company or individuals and they all had very small audiences. Hardly anyone even used the calendar. If you're doing nothing but email, it isn't really the right tool for the job. Still, this limitation was a huge PITA.
Luckily, mailbox caps were never enforced until last year when we moved to Exchange--so it was never really *that* much of a problem for me.
Re:IBMr (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow, I find it amazing that the limit hasn't gone up at all in the 7.5 years I've been here, yet Google can offer me 2 gigs (and counti
None (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I don't even bother. If people want to keep all of the e-mail that they've ever sent or received and are willing to pay for the infrastructure to support it, why should I stop them?
Educate your users (Score:5, Interesting)
Sending binary copies of document XYZ
Not for archiving every piece of information that's communicated
If your user has 13GB of email, they most likely have an excessive amount of binary data floating around with it. Also, they've probably saved every useless piece of email that they've ever collected. As an ex-admin my boss was the most abusive offender. I always made sure to annoy staff to keep their exchange directories clean. Invariably, they'd always fill up again, and the cycle continued ad-infinitum.
But with all these measures, we were able to roughly stabilize the amount of email that any particular user had. Take the top 10 offenders, or those that set a MB line. Post their names in an email to the company. State something like: The following employees have email boxes that are excessively large. Please clean out your mailboxes by:
1. Deleting un-important emails that have attachments
2. Cleaning out 'deleted' folder
3. Removing unnessisary files
4. Archiving old email that is historically 'important'
Anyways, if you have to talk to them in the face about what they need to do, then do it. Apathy wins the day if you sit on your ass and expect users to care about anything you say.
Re:Educate your users (Score:5, Interesting)
And what's wrong with making your e-mail system do what the users want it to do? Why not tailor your e-mail system to your users' needs? Sure, it costs a bit more for a bigger mail server, but that's ok as long as that's what everyone wants.
Re:Educate your users (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail is a service used by employees to get work done. In the case of marketing/sales types, 1GB of saved e-mail is common, and it's critical business data. Yes, some of that data is binary, but it is critical.
Often administrators impose quotas, let the users whine a bit, and then the whining subsides. The adminstrators think that the problem is solved; nope, what actually happened is that all that critical e-mail just got moved to local folders. When that local hard disk inevitably crashes, taking the critical data for a $1 million sales deal along with it, the whining will turn to screaming.
The solution (in my opinion) is for administrators and companies to reevaluate how much e-mail is worth to users. For many, I'd argue it's worth many thousands of dollars. I'm sure some of that money could be used for a reasonable amount of storage.
Company Limits (Score:2, Funny)
Open your mouth (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply amazing (Score:2)
What I want to know is how you managed to get files this big without them getting corrupted and unreadable?
Yeah we aren't using Exchange/Outlook anymore....
Offline Archival (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually look at some of the people's email accounts, you'll notice that they never empty their deleted items folder. We informed people that they should move stuff out of their deleted items if they want to save it, and then 2 weeks later set up a policy to empty all of the deleted items folders. This cleared up over 10 GB on a network with 150 users.
Of course, anything you do should be authorized by your management, since some situations are dictated by law. Since we were funded by government grants, we were required to keep 7 years of emails related to the programs. You'll also cover your a** this way, since if someone has a complaint about you doing something, you can refer them to your supervisor.
Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you consider it to be inappropriate? My email is backed up daily, is searchable, and provides a nice indexed (by date/sender/subject) record of my work.
Re:Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Give users another way to email documents around (Score:2)
This soultion also lets people IM documents back and forth
Windows NT Days... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Windows NT Days... (Score:5, Funny)
Appropriate punishment.
best practices (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exch
Second, as for storage limits, I would limit their exchange storage to 1GB per user, and (if you can. this only works with MSOffice Outlook) on the server side, set a autoarchive policy to archive files older than a few months to their archive folder on their PC except for the Deleted items (30 days then delete) and Junk Mail (7 Days then delete).
Third, Make sure they are made aware of any change that will affect their exchange mail store, that way, when Jim moans about how he lost all of his mail in Deleted Items after a month in there, you can point him to the memo.
What's the big deal ? (Score:2)
Exchange (Score:2)
I had never used Outlook before I started this job, and I quickly figured out what a local
Look to your backup software (Score:2)
My Employer Is Fairly Large (Score:2)
Not nearly enough information (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have regulatory and compliance issues, and almost everyone does these days, then you can set a much smaller mailbox size and enforce archiving or deletion. In my environment, 15000 Exchange users with heavy regulatory and compliance requirements, we allow 100MB for the typical user, 250Mb for a supervisory employee, 500MB for middle management and 1Gb for some really higher ups. We have a total of just under 2TB of live maail at the moment, and roughtly 10tb archived.
There are alot of really cool products on the market like CommVault DataMigrator for Exchange, and EMC email extender to make alot of this seamless for you. You can use these produicts to move all of the stale (and you can define stale according to a bunch of different criteria) data off to slower (ie cheaper) storage and out of your message stores. The mail migrator will leave a stub in exchange which looks just like a mail message in outlook. The only difference is that if someone opens one of these older messages they have to wait a couple of seconds while it is brought back into the message store. The whole process is transparent.
These products aren't cheap, but they wind up saving a ton of money, as well as improving performance because you can use much less fast storage for email, your backup needs decrease by a huge amount since you only archive like once a month (and therefore only back that data up once a month), and as a bonus you can easily meet all regulatory and compliance requirements.
Cyrus IMAP + Postfix (Score:5, Interesting)
Our IT guys tell us to move them to personal... (Score:2)
This solved the problem for us from a 'server' point of view. Now we just get users who say they're out of disk space.
Our limits (Score:2)
Risk-driven rules vs. Storage-driven rules (Score:5, Interesting)
Our standard corporate users have the following restrictions on e-mail:
One of the largest drivers for these policies is to limit liability and exposure in the event of legal action. The goal here is not to eliminate messages (burn the evidence!), but to make backup and recovery feasible over the long-term. While an individual employee may not be able to keep an e-mail for more than one year, corporately we maintain backups of all e-mail messages for seven years. We are attempting to put reasonable limits in place to ensure that in the event an e-mail must be recovered for legal or regulatory reasons, it can be easily found and identified. We've also added additional technological measures to make this easier, such as using content-addressable storage for long-term archive of e-mail messages.
This policy is an inconvience for many workers - 200 MB of e-mail goes pretty quick, especially when e-mail is the preferred medium for exchanging documents. This is has forced our employees to change the way they use e-mail, as well as to take better advantage of other systems that had become passé, such as our file and print system.
If you are planning on putting limits such as these in place, make certain you communicate them well in advance. Provide your employees resources and guidance on how to best transition to the new policies, and offer tips on breaking bad e-mail habits.
Overall, large corporations cannot afford the risk or the cost of storing gigabytes of e-mail for every employee. It's a tough road, but one that many companies appear to be taking. Best of luck with your endevours.
Use a time quota, not a size quota (Score:5, Interesting)
Two years ago, we migrated from Lotus Notes to Exchange -- at the time of migration, we were informed, in no uncertain terms, that any email left on the server for more than 30 days would be automatically purged. If you want to keep it, back it up to a local fileserver, or to localhost. There is an option to retrieve auto-deleted email, but it's costed back to your department, so repeat offenders will likely be talking this over with a manager.
The most common approach to managing the archive is to create an annual archive, and stuff everything in there during the year. At the next calendar flip, start a new archive. I've gone back to the 2004 archive a couple of times to retrieve stuff, but not often.
Being forced to keep one's inbox cleaned out (nothing over 30 days old in there, or it gets wiped) is good practice - it's helped a lot of people to stay ahead of their inbox. Whereas I used to use the inbox for long-term storage, and touch a message four or five times, I now tend to touch it once: read it and then either delete it, file it, or copy into a new calendar/todo entry.
The 30-day quota has worked very well for us.
Mail is not storage and Exchange sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
The nice thing about Exchange (I'll burn for using those five words in sequence) is that all your information is stored in one place. You can search and manage it from 1 interface and backups/full disks/etc are being dealt with by the system administrators.
By using
The size of the mailbox reveals the problem. It's not being used for mail, but for file storage. The only real solution to this is the education of you users. I know, dealing with users is one of the hardest parts of being a system administrator, but no technical solution will help you here (except for completly blocking attachments).
Unfortunately training will only go so far. Nowadays it's normal to send 5mb Word documents around. Expecting users to choose a sensible fileformat, and reducing images to realistic resolutions is one bridge to far. So you'll still have to deal with many multi-megabyte mails.
This is where the Exchange sucks parts comes into play. Exchange just isn't very good at dealing with huge mailboxes. When discussing mailbox limits the usual response seems to be "Yeah, we could add a few more disks, but we also need a much bigger server. The current machine can barely keep up with the load as it is".
First things first (Score:4, Insightful)
1) E-mail is not a file transfer protocol.
2) Public folders (in the Microsoft Exchange sense) are not meant for use as a file server
Next you have to get management to purchase a couple things:
1) An on-demand e-mail archival solution. This product should integrate with your MUA (probably Outlook). The users should be able to locate and extract an archived email from the archival solution quickly and with minimal effort; otherwise the solution will not be utilized.
2) A better spam filter. I'd be willing to bet that a large part of your mail store is spam. There is no auditing requirement to archive non-business-related e-mail. Can the spam.
3) A web-based file-transfer/file-sharing solution. Since you're going to stop people from receiving large attachments via email (you are, aren't you?) you need to provide a method of transfer. One method is to use any of a hundred free or commercial trouble ticketing products like Request Tracker [bestpractical.com] or even Bugzilla [bugzilla.org] to create a secure way to transfer files between an external source and an internal employee by attaching files to an open and assigned ticket. There are numerous products out there that can satisfy this requirement, especially in these post-Sarbanes-Oxley/HIPAA/GLBA/etc times.
Next up is to clean up the PST nigthmare. I was recently involved as a consultant in the IT department of a company about your size. Dozens of their users had reached the 2GB PST limit numerous times. Their PSTs were rotated out and they simply started a new PST. The old PSTs were of course opened automatically within Outlook. These PSTs were stored on the company's main file server in the users' home directories. At some point we eventually realized that all incoming mail was delivered straight to PST instead of the users' mail spools in the information store. The day after this one of our Windows admins happened to notice that the text of the users' home directories were blue. That's right; they were compressed. Whoops! As a temporary solution for a failing mail server the previous admin staff decided to deliver mail straight to PSTs. This of course became the long-term practice. Soon they ran low on disk space. To solve this the temporarily enabled compression on the single large volume that this Windows server served to the LAN. This too became the long-term solution. Uncompressed I want to say that the data was around 800GB. Compressed it was 450GB or so. The admin staff didn't tell management what was going on and to the best of my knowledge management didn't ask or simply thought all was well. Our Windows admins are still trying to clean up this mess and these are the best Windows guys I've ever met.
Instigate policies that limit the amount of time received mail, sent items, deleted mail, drafts, etc are kept in the main inbox. A good archival solution should be able to mimick your policy in its config. Delete the deleted items daily. Dump the drafts every 2 weeks. Archive the sent items once a month. Archive the inbox every 3 months (quarterly, twice a year, whatever fits your needs).
Above all you have to get management's support and backing. Without that your pissing in the wind. Some squeaky-wheel middle management person with a Napolean-complex will put the brakes on the whole thing if you don't have upper-management's support. To get this support show them in dollars how much it would cost to restore the entire PST collection if you had a SAN failure (you do have a SAN, don't you?). Show them how much time you spend each week restoring mailboxes of enourmous size. Show management auditing requirements and how you don't meet them with your current setup. There's a lot you can do. Best of luck.
Re:First things first (Score:3, Interesting)
Excutives can't access your network and its file transfer solution from their laptop on a plane. They expect and NEED all the files that are referred to in emails, to be IN the mailbox that they have synchronized to their laptop.
Macro to remove attachments from selected emails (Score:5, Informative)
This macro will remove attachments from the current selection of mail items in Outlook. Pretty handy ...
Just 25 for us (Score:5, Funny)
Re:2GB (Score:3, Funny)
One day I was helping a secretary clean up her old email (before migrating her to Thunderbird actually) and went to empty her Trash folder. She went nuts and said, "Wait, there is stuff in there I want". Turns out she had hundreds of email messages in dozens of folders and sub folders in her Trash folder, neatly organizing a bunch of mail she wanted
Re:2GB (Score:3, Funny)
Not that unusual really. I file most memos from my boss in the trash. Doesn't everyone?
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens in the company stays in the company.
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:4, Insightful)
Low Email storage limits are another reason why IT's reputation continues to worsen. If an internet company can offer 2GB+ of email storage to millions of users for FREE, then why can my large company offer more than 100MB of email storage to five thousand professional staff?
Because that's how the Internet Company makes it's money. They make money by giving mass amounts of storage to people who will use their service and view ads based on the content of the email. In other companies, email is a cost center. It costs more money to give that much storage. If we were to provide 2GB of storage for each of our users, we would have to have well over 3TB space on the email server. That costs money and the company doesn't want to spend it.
On the email system I manage (Exchange 2000) for 1600 users, we have a limit of 75MB per mailbox. Rediculously small, yes, but when you only have 200GB total, including larger mailboxes for marketing, VP level and higher and service accounts that send and receive a huge quantity of large messages and management doesn't want to spend money, that's what you get. We set Outlook to automatically empty Deleted Items except for those that want to store messages in their deleted items (Wha--???????? - [I shrug] whatever you say...) and have their "recover from deleted items" purge themselves after 2 months. The good news is we are about to upgrade our email system to about 1TB storage. We will likely edge the mailbox sizes up, but won't tell anyone. If we did, they'd start expecting unlimited storage again. Besides, we continue to grow. We've nearly doubled in size in the six years I've been there. Yes, it gets expensive when you need to provide some rediculous number of 9's worth of uptime. Having an email server cluster that is replicated to a duplicate cluster at the DR site gets quite expensive. Want massive uptime for the same price? Pay for it in storage.
Oh, and a 10MB per message limit. Once they get a few of those and fill their mailbox, they delete the hundreds of tiny messages before finally calling me. I explain the difference between byte, kilobytes and megabytes and explain that this one email takes up the space of 10,000 of these smaller ones. Yes, they need training. I've already put it in the company newsletter. You know those things don't apply to them.
Yes, it's been a long day. I'll shut up now.
Re:Been there (Score:2)
Re:This is actually a big grivance for me (Score:2)
Don't forget you can strip off attachments even from replies a lot of the time. I do! All my work is sorted on off-line
Need to back up copies? Do it.