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What Corporate Email Limits Do You Have?
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."
I can't imagine that 320 people have 420GB of business data stored on the company servers. If they honestly are using all that space for business related material, you guys need to fix up a TB or two of networked storage + employee training in how to use it.
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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
We're limited to 10MB attachment/message. Attachments can't be executable or compressed volumes containing executable files. Other than that we aren't really limited. (There is a cap on how large my mailboxes can be on the server, but they they increase the space regularly so I've never actually cared to pay attention to the cap.) As I understand it, I'm expected to leave all of my e-mail their forever and not worry about deleting.
Type of Business: Work from Home
Number of Users: 1
E-Mail Platform: GMail
After two years, we have to have it archived locally. And we handle attachments spearately.
Every work email I receive gets forwarded to myaddress@gmail.com. Every work email I send gets sent to myaddress.bcc@gmail.com.
We imposed a limit of 2GB maximum. The best part of our company is the people with over 4,000 emails in their "Deleted Items" folder, since they dont understand the concept of the "Deleted" part. They use it as a storage folder...
50 Users
Windows NT 4 Server
Outlook 2000
Windows XP
Our current setup (Exchange,30 users) limits people to 100 Mb of online e-mail storage. I consider this obscenely small, but I'm not the admin here and HAVE been on the other side of the fence, so can see the reasons.
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
We have a 60MB Limit for warning with a 90MB limit for receiving and a 120MB limit for sending and receiving. We have some 300+ users and this keeps our mailbox store at a manageable level and allows for quick mailbox restores from backup. We have users archive to a .pst file on a SAN that is in the backup rotation. Since we can add storage to the SAN on the fly, it's not a problem with overall storage. We also issue quarterly documents discussing mailbox storage and how-tos in an effort to educate our users on what is acceptable to keep and what isn't.
Lastly, we have a bi-yearly "purge" of mailboxes. Where our staff generates a report and finds the top 20 mailboxes and pst files and does individual sit downs with them on how to better manage their mailboxes.
As we're also under the HIPAA rules, all deleted mail goes into an archive that is offloaded periodically to follow the rules.
Our maiboxes are anywhere around 100MB to 250MB in size, upgradeable upon request. A few are multiple gigabytes in size. The main growth comes from people sending documents around, which have a 10MB size limit.
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.
Exchange Server, archiving with Enterprise Vault. 6 actual servers, the users distributed over them. 10 Mb attachment limit, no executables, zip files with executables, or anything we can't scan for whatever reason.
Approx. 8000 users, no mailbox size limit, anything over 1 month old gets archived in the vault.
If you were to run a different mail server, where not all the info was stored in huge databases (like Exchange) I can guarantee the backup process would be much easier. For example, if you were to run cyrus-imapd and store all the mail as files on a filesystem, and then come up with any backup plan, it would be 10x easier to perform and backup/restore than with Exchange. Exchange's flaws come in the fact that it has those huge databases to contend with, and if you were dealing with a filesystem, a restore is extremely simple and precise.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
None, whatsoever. However, users are warned that e-mail is not backed-up and subject to being erased any time. So if people want to keep stuff, it's their responsibility to save and archive the stuff (on backed-up servers).
we have a 100mb limit. 7000 users, though, so anything more would get out of control. The biggest issue is education - you need to educate the users that the mail system is NOT a file storage system - pull attachments OUT of email, and put them on the NAS - that is what the NAS is there for. Email is for communication, not long term storage of documents.
I've seen this before. It is always marketting and management that eat up the most disk space, and they always insist that every single byte is mission critical. They will pay lip service, and delete some stuff, but never enough to make a real difference. Even if you try to put in quotas now, they will insist on exemptions and/or huge quotas. Most likley both.
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
At IBM, we obviously use Lotus Notes and our restrictions are pretty tight. If you hit about 100MB, you start getting nasty candygrams from the server administrator. When you hit the cap of 150MB, they cut you off.
/
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. :
The large Exchange environment I help administer (30,000+ users) imposes a 100MB limit by default (with 10MB increments for prohibit send, prohibit send & receive). We keep 15 days of retention, and do no archive yet. We just got done upgrading our equipment so we can accomodate more growth, but we estimate that we will have to do something (ie: an archiving solution) in the next two years again.
Z
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
Where I work, we are on Lotus Notes and we will be moving to Exchange within the next month of so (ugh!).
.pst's, but they will be stored on the person's workstation, so it will not be backed up. Many times you find that it's internal documents, that can be shared through a sort of portal, that are forwarded to 10-20 people. Show the users how to create links. Another feature that I used in Lotus Notes when people complained that they needed more space, is to sort all documents by size. Show them that the 8mb funny.mpeg file that they have in their mailbox isn't needed 8 times.
Here's what our policy will be since I could never enforce one in Lotus Notes.
200mb soft limit (warning)
250mb hard limit (no longer able to send email)
20mb attachment size limit
I'm also forcing (well trying) to automate the cleanup on certain folders. Deleted mail is 5 days, I wanted calendar entries to get flushed after 60 days but that got rejected.
What you really need is support from management, and then some sort of user training. We will be showing users how to create
Again I stress...support from management and a signed policy will go a long way. Also it doesn't hurt to attach a cost per mb when someone goes over quota. If some departments want more space, then it's simple...bill them =-)
I like your idea of the gmail accounts. Maybe I'll make that suggestion here...
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. They don't know that sending 10 raw pictures is 100 megs easily, they just think (oh, I'm just sending a few pics from over the weekend). If you were to set some reasonable limits on attachment sizes (say 10mb) you'd get some whiners at first, but in the long run it'd go away. The problem isn't so much how many emails people get, it's the damn attachments!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I work in the IT department of a company whose primary business is not IT.
.pst stored on my hard drive. I organize it into different categories when I do this. It's a pain in the ass, but it works.
We use Exchange, and my e-mail limit is currently 50mb. This is after I requested it to be raised from 30mb. Part of my job is providing tech support to the customer relations group. This sometimes involves getting screenshots of applications that are not functioning properly. These e-mails typically have a bitmap (or two) attached and weigh in around 1mb-2mb. This, plus my limit, plus the fact that we're supposed to save all business e-mails for at least 5 years creates a problem.
When my mailbox fills up I usually just dump all the old stuff into a
My outlook consumes over 100mb of space; my messages only go back 4 months and I'm a lowly peon where I work. Take someone higher up on higher traffic distribution lists with excel spreadsheets / word documents who has been at the company for a few years and doesn't clean out irrelevant emails (or AutoArchive) and yeah, you will have a lot of users at a gig and a lot of users over that.
The ones at 10+ gigs probably - like I said - are on distribution lists and aren't deleting attachments.
Back when Exchange still had a 16GB mail store limit, I tried to implement mail storage quotas. It failed miserably, as the people I had to exempt from the quotas (managers and such) were the very same people that were largely responsible for the size of the mail store.
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?
setup...
Regular archiving is encouraged but users are supposed to archive to their data directory on the server since that is backed up nightly.
We have some users who take up a lot of space (particularly in legal and accounting, which have to keep pretty much everything for up to seven or more years).
However, most of the users with massive amounts of email stored are housing emails with subject lines like "CHECK OUT THE 75 CUTEST KITTEN PICTURES EVER!!!!"
Email is NOT for:
...
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.
Bye!
My companies Policies and Procedures Manual explicitly states that at all times our personal Inbox must contain no more than ten (10) emails regarding penis enlargement, twenty-five (25) advertisements for prescription drugs, and seventy (70) CVS or Subversion commit messages. Users found to be in violation are fined $1 per message over the limit and will have every piece of email sent to their account during an eight (8) hour period broadcast to the entire company.
You are reading Slashdot on a free day pass. Thanks for the support.
BSD: NetBSD's Real-Time Network Backup
Posted by ScuttleMonkey in The Mysterious Future!
from the old-hardware-power dept.
jschauma writes "One of NetBSD's developers, der Mouse, was interviewed by DaemonNews about his real-time network backup system (originally presented at BSDCan 2005), where changes to your local filesystem are automatically propagated to a backup server. In his interview der Mouse tells about his idea, how it works, and of course, how cool it is."
You'd be surprised how effective that might be. If you're the IT Overseer, get the names of the top 1% hoarders, stop by their offices, and have a quick little chat. Much more effective and fair for everyone than screaming "omg, ban teh emails!!!oneone"
Linux box using sendmail and Pine. 200 users. A few whiners on Outlook. It's the old 80/20 rule. Only a few users actually abuse the system and tend to keep thousands of messages with the ususal excuses. Slightly un-related: One fellow uploaded several hundred megs of MP3 files to the common directory, whereupon the backup tapes overflowed. Took awhile to discover why. I gave him 24 hours to get them off or face deletion, problem solved. For the packrats, disciplinary procedures are the only thing that make them comply. Also, rm -r /home/dumbass/mail works okay. Dunno what happened. Must've overflowed or something. Never seen it do that. Sorry. Mutsa been too much stuff in there.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
We have a limit of exactl
My company only allows 40Mb before the warning messages appear. For me this amounts to about a month or two of email... provided I strip any emails with big attachments. I'd personally like alot more as I commonly have to reference old emails from several months prior (who said what when, why is this authorized, who originally requested such and such... etc.)
.gif or .jpg.
I find the VAST majority of people just have poor email etiquette. Commonly people send large word documents or images without zipping. People will commonly "reply to all" to such a message and leave the attachment included (most common with inserted images). Let's not forget since someone just did a paste of a print screen it's a bitmap and not something with a decent size like a
This is a all on a Microsoft enterprise email solution... I can't tell you the exact number but it has to be several thousand users. Let's say 5. 5,000 users.
1. I work from home, so my limit is my hard drive ;)
2. PST files? Outlook? Ugh. Eudora is far better.
My total email amount only considering text (*.MBX) is 92MB. With attachments, et al, it's 628MB.
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....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
At my previous employer we had two people use around 4Gb for their Exchange mailboxes. We spoke with them and had them archive all of the stuff they haven't used in a few years to a .pst file. Then we burned this to 2 DVD's, gave them 1 copy and stored 1 copy with our tapes.
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.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
We give warnings to users at 30MB, lock out sending at 45MB, and lock send and receive at 60MB. They can store emails in Personal Folders out on the file servers though to their hearts content.
We'll up individual limits occasionally when a user is going to travel for an extended period of time or is doing something that requires their email store to be a little larger temporarily.
One of the reasons that big mailbox limits should be discouraged is that big limits generally encourage people to use their mailboxes to archive important information there, which is inappropriate, and often leads to losing important stuff.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Create a file share with a folder for each user only writable by them and accessible through a web server by everyone. Encourage users to put documents that they would share with others in that folder. They can then browse it with their web browser and copy and paste a link to someone. This has the added benefit of being able to update the document and since everyone just has the link, they see the current version whenever they open the document.
This soultion also lets people IM documents back and forth instantly skipping email entirely.
The disadvantage is that older versions aren't preserved forever. This, however, is directly related to space usage and if space efficiency is what you are going for this is a good thing.
In the end, you should probably just suck it up and expand your storage. 420gb is tiny. I just upgraded my home storage from a 450GB RAID5 array to a 2TB RAID6 array for about $2500. Forget having tons of people waste time and money sorting through emails and just find a reasonably priced way give them plenty of space.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I remember one incident at a Fujitsu division when my co-worker was instructed to send a 36MB core dump file by email to our supervisor. For whatever reason, he accidentally sent the email to everyone in the division (~1200 people). Needless to say, the Windows NT email server keeled over and the administrator spent three days removing every copy of the core file from each account. It was no surprise that my co-worker was let go when a round of layoffs came. But, very surprisingly, he was hired back the administrator to work in the IT department. Go figure.
.. you can likely save a *massive amount of space* through simple education:
.ppt file that was emailed around.
- 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 file, the person should email the location of the file. As a side bonus this helps with versioning etc.
- Filter *.avi/*.mpg/*.asf/*.swf/*.mp3 as company policy. It is highly unlikely any of these have anything to do with company information but I bet your mail server is wasting GB storing them in people's inboxes.
First off, if you haven't run the Exchange best practices analyzer tool, Do so. It gives out a lot of advice regarding exchange and it's settings.a nge/downloads/2003/analyzers/default.mspx
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.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Here we have 160 users for about 13GB of emails. We do ont have limits, not do we expect to put any. Email is the lifeblood of the company, and it is handled with the respect it deserves. 13GB is actualy a very small amount of data compared to all the other stuff we handle. Setup: Solaris + SAN + Postfix + Dovecot (IMAP) Most users have all their emails (in and out) ever since they started here.
We run MS Exchange, 40MB limit on the server. You start getting "Warning" emails just before 39MB IIRC, then at around just past 40MB you can't send emails, since your quota's full.
.PST file was for, and I was good to go. Yeah, I save practically everything, but the first thing I do is save attachments and delete them from emails and meeting requests; second is to clear out all Sent Items with attachments to my local .PST. When it hits a GB, I start a new one.
.PSTs, how to back them up for safekeeping, hot to clear out attachments, etc.
I had never used Outlook before I started this job, and I quickly figured out what a local
Best thing I know is to do exactly that: 50 MB hard limit per account on the server, and fucking EDUCATE people on how to make local
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
We have a 100MB soft limit, 150MB Hard limit. I receive over 100 emails CCed everyday, plus the ones that are directed to me. I have to download everything to my machine. I have over 10GB of email, separated on quarterly archived PST files. We don't have special permisions, thus almost everyone dowloads their mail to their machines.
Our environment: Exchange 2003 Standard SP2, ~30 users, business is ASP
I was in the same situation when I arrived here. Users were not restricted in any way. Mailboxes ranged in size from a couple hundred MB's to 6 GB's. PST's were not used at all. At the time I imposed the limits, SP2 had not been released yet, so I had a clear business reason for needing to implement restrictions resulting from the size limitations with pre-SP2 Exchange Standard installations.
I implemented a 500 MB mailbox limit with notifications sent out at 450 MB. Only sending is cut off at 500 MB. Receiving is allowed until the user hits 600 MB. I did this to minimize the chances of our customers having emails they sent in get bounced.
You may also consider looking at public folders for archiving common email, if applicable to your environment. A large percentage of the email in our system is email coming from customers that was sent to a distribution list. The emails need to be kept for reference, but don't need to be kept in the individual mailboxes. By delivering them to a public folder and training my users to use the public folder for historical reference, at least I am saving them in one place rather than in 10 places.
The main solution the backup industry seems to be header towards is automatic email archiving. I know for sure Veritas (I mean Symantec), CommVault, Legato and ARCserve all offer email archive solutions for Exchange. They all tend to work in the same way, by removing the real email message from the database and putting in a stub. The real email is then stored in the backup system (either in a another database server, in a backup file, or on tape). Whenever the user goes to access one of these really only emails, the system sees the stub, notifies the user it may take a minute, and retrieves the real one and hands it back to the user.
So I recommend contacting who ever you happen to use for your backup software and see what solutions they can give you. I've seen some reports that say they are able to shrink their data stores by 50% or more.
The only word of caution I can give for these solutions is it does modify your datastore at a very low level. If you ever lose your exchange archive, you're pretty much toast. The data store no longer has the complete message. Just something to keep in mind.
at over 100,000 employees, almost all in the U.S. We're a nearly-all-MS shop running Outlook 2003 for clients and we're in the process of switching (we're mostly done) from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. Normal users are allowed to send emails no bigger than 2 megabytes. Power users get to send 10 mb. Everyone can have all the *.pst files they want on their local drive, but they are allotted a maximum of 500 mb on a network share for storage. If they want to fill it up with *.pst files, that's fine with us though we try to educate people about how network shares can be a dangerous place to keep *.pst files. (Latency problems and corrupted *.pst files go hand-in-hand.) Exchange mail boxes are soft-limited to 90 megs; the warnings start going out. The hard limit kicks in at 95 megs; when the mailbox gets that big, the user can no longer send mail.
The biggest thing is user education. I wonder how many people delete stuff from their Sent Items folder without realizing it is just copied over to their Deleted Items folder. I know I was surprised to find that out.
We don't have limit on mailbox size, but do have a suggested maximum on attachment size. The users are not only encouraged but have to backup their own emails, because anything that's older than 3 months will be automatically deleted.
(I don't know how that compares to other companies, but mind you that we allowed p2p software until recently...)
You haven't provided nearly enough information for any answer you get to be useful. For example, there are lots of good reasons to keep that data. Business needs may (or may not) be obvious but you may also, depending on your business have regulatory requirements.
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.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
SIS only saves you if it's a single email to others on the same storage group. If its sent to others on different storage groups it replicates, if it's moved or forwarded it replicates.
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?
Seems a little small to me
Exchange 2003 600 or so users, "normal" users get 150MB of mail store + 750MB (quote enforced) home directories (we have prepositioned \mail directories here for user .PST's if they want them), SarOX requirements are taken care of with backups (EVault), use Exchange Server Deleted Mail Retention to make sure deleted items get backed up before being permanently deleted.
:) ).
.PST's, how to filter and organize mail, etc..,).
.PST it up for them and throw it on a couple of cheap NAS boxes we have for this purpose. All in all works out pretty well.
Senior Executives essentially get as much storage space as they want, however since they've been asked to keep mail storage reasonable most of them are way less than a gig (a few funding requests for expensive new storage to expand mail store space generally helps to garner their active support in keeping there mailbox sizes at a reasonable level
It also helps to have a good email policy stating that company email use is for company business only, as well as limiting attachment sizes (I think ours is around 15 mb). Educating your users (and getting a buy-in) as to best practices usage is essential (i.e. why keeping mailbox sizes reasonable is important, saving off attachments and then deleting them from inboxes, archiving important mail in
Lastly for users that really need to save large amounts of mail in near line storage (easy access) we
No sense trying to stem the tide by putting your finger in the dike or any other roadblocks. That's enough metaphors to keep sales busy for a while. Instead, plan and budget for a system that can adequately handle the load. Multiple servers, backend and frontend if needed. Backup to disk and then stream to tape. Standby servers if quick restores are required.
Sure it's huge. Sure it's a mess. But, it'll cost a fortune to do it right and if management doesn't choke on the cost and demand that you implement limits immediately, you have no way of avoiding it. And why would you want to anyway? It's not your money. If they want to waste their money, don't let your puritanical geekiness get in the way. Spend the money to do it right and make your life easy.
We have almost 500 heavy IMAP users in a corporate environment, and there's lots of mailing attachments back & forth despite the availability of file servers. Our IMAP backend used to be pretty big until we implemented mailbox quotas. We have no policy for setting a maximum mailbox size - every user starts off with 100MB, and if they need more they just ask for it, and get it, in 100MB increments. The quota serves one and only one purpose: to remind users that space on the server is limited and costs the company money (mainly in terms of backup expenses). It's just a periodic reminder to clean up the old crap they're not using anymore. If they hit the quota limit, their mail delivery is interrupted until they either delete some old junk or call support and ask for a quota increase. They would usually rather delete some old mail than call support. That alone reduced our IMAP storage requirements from ~110 GB to ~30GB.
include $sig;
1;
We have probably 25 users with 2GB+ folders and one with 13GB (she has worked here for 13 or so years). If you ask me, you can't limit online mail folder storage unless you implement a damn good document management system. Outlook/Exchange serves many purposes: document archival, covering your ass ("look! I DID send them that contract update" OR "see I told you so 5 months ago"), and also knowledge base ("he told us how to do that sometime in June '04"). Also, if email is mission critical for your biz, server side mail folders (no matter how big) are MUCH easier to backup than archive files on PCs.
.jpg files (for some reason). Password protected zip files reign for data falling under the HIPAA laws.
The attitude around here seems to be that the infastructure must flex to the needs of the users. Over empowered IT managers and cheapskate bosses tend to be the reason for limiting email down to 250 or 100mb. Take a hint from gmail: you should never delete anything (esp. related to business).
We have 5 Exchange servers and Outlook 2003, max message size is 20mb, and you cannot send
My company (a large aerospace firm with many many thousands of employees) keeps the amount of mail you can leave on the server pretty low, around 28MB or so with a max of 15MB for attachments. Most people who have a need to keep long-term email records archive the mail they need/want on their local machines.
We have no size limitations as to attachments, therefore people send everything uncompressed here. I think last check I had an 11GB pst file.
Frankly when you're sending CAD drawings around, you're talking 5-25MB/drawing, and it can accumulate VERY quickly. Since I am in touch with so many different people (I'm an engineer that does his own Project Management), I can see upwards of 15 drawings/day at times. Even archiving doesn't help a whole lot since it renews so quickly.
...folders so that only your inbox is taking up corporate space.
;)
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.
Loading...
I used to work in a financial-systems company. On of our customer service people had his .pst fill up when it reached 2 gig. I'd estimate that at *least* 95% of his e-mail was work related. Won't say much else, but it was a pain in the *ss to fix.
--LWM
15 users. Sendmail MTA. Dovecot IMAP server. 10MB max message size. No limits on mailbox size or age.
Attachments are your problem, automatically purge all attachments over 1-3 months old to a shared network storage device, problem solved. People should not be using the email system as their personal file store, which often happens.
Are there only 300-something users, TOTAL in your environment? There are a copule of issues here - 1) For Exchange performance, you can't keep mailboxes that large around. Besides hurting users with large mailboxes, store.exe can't load enough data in memory to effectively serve MAPI clients. While not preferable, offloading to PST will at least help performance for everyone on that server. 2) All of those PSTs will cost at least as much, if not more, in network storage $$ than their Exchange database sizes. That, and exporting massive amounts of mail will just leave you with holes that will require an offline defrag of a database so massive, that your eseutil job will last for a day or two on good hardware. Large enterprises are looking at near-line storage of Exchange messaging through the use of archiving/storage management products that are exchange-aware. Not sure if these are an option for you, but Veritas, Legato and others all have options. We have 10,000+ mailboxes and face similar issues (no one at 13GB, though).
and everything sent/received is auto-archived on a 40TB (max capacity) SAN and kept for 18 months for audit trail purposes.
We run Exchange for our mailserver at work. Each user is only allowed 100MB. After that, warnings are sent to the user. After 125MB, the user cannot send mail and after 150MB, no send or receive is allowed. Attachments are limited to 15MB (I think...somewhere around there) and users are encouraged to keep PSTs, but they are not allowed on the fileservers. There is a trade off between convenience and the amount of money you throw at storage and infrastructure. Since most people only use one computer for their email, they should be fine with keeping the PST on their desktop system. If they need their mail to follow them, then they can keep it in the mailbox on the server. 100MB should be plenty for the average user to have for anywhere access.
We have about 18,000 mailboxes in exchange
Students get 20MB
Staff/faculty get 50MB
If staff / faculty need more or want more then they can request increases to 100MB or more
even letting someone get 13GB sounds ridiculous
sounds like you probably have 100GB+ of spam
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
No shit... I guess i can have over 1gb of messages stating "stop sending me this shit" :>
NO MORE KITTENS
VIAGRA
Oh, an send this to 100 friends or your meatloaf will burn
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
I work in finance, and we essentially let our users be. I believe there's something like a 1GB/message limit, and no mailbox limits at all.
Mailbox/Message limits create enormous hassles for employees, and also create data recovery problems (do you REALLY want potentially critical data in a pst file on somebody's laptop?).
The lost productivity from making information workers circumvent these measures meant that it was a false economy. I ended up giving a recommendation that we increase the per-person overhead cost of e-mail slightly, by massively increasing the available storage space.
It's been several years since I started recommending this policy, and it has panned out extremely favorably.
Abuse has been extremely uncommon, possibly because employees are all aware that corporate e-mail communications are all subject to a ton of different laws.
My company uses e-mail for our 2nd contact point for our support team, dealing with issues ranging from e-mail bouncebacks all the way to WAN connectivity issues. We currently have a shared box on exchange as well as individual boxes. The e-mails go to each of our boxes and a copy also goes to the shared box. Our individual boxes are limited to 100 mb each. The shared box is unlimited. I find that if I set my auto-archive to nab most mails at 3 months and store them on my hard drive, I can stay at about 80 megs give or take 10. Auto-archive is a savior.
You're nothing; like me.
Our users are limited by Outlook's file size limit, which is 2GB.
.pst file for easy searching in the future. That folder is then archived off the server on to DVD(s), along with each user's .pst for that job inside.
Each project has a folder in the Inbox, with Received and Sent subfolders under that. All corresponding e-mails to a certain job are to be placed in those folders. When that job is finished, the e-mail project folder is exported to the particular job's folder on the server as a
It's not exactly a business, but at the university I attend, we are limited to about 25MB of email storage space. We use Novell NetMail, and there are 20,000 to 25,000 students.
I run a small private server on my DSL with outside users, IMAP, and POP3 on a Debian box with Postfix as my MTA of choice. The default for Postfix is to have a soft 50MB limitation for the mailbox - that is, it's 50 MB, but if an attachment comes in that breaks the quota, it doesn't bounce, it just causes further inbound mail to bounce. This can, of course, be altered
/var - usually /var/spool/mail or /var/mail. Backups are trivial if you have to, and users are encouraged to POP their mail down rather than IMAP.
I'll also point out that using Exchange for your MTA is a bad idea for the databasing issues - a postfix mail spool, by default, is a flat ASCII file stored (at least, in Linux) somewhere in
This sig no verb.
At some point, you've got to make use of this feature.
I know there are reasons for storing email, but come on, a 13GB mailbox? Either you're saving all your spam, or you've got a lot of crap going out with your emails.
Try this: remove html/rich text ability, enforce auto archiving, and "delete" emails over 5 years old. (Move 'em to tape in case needed)
There's simply no need to keep that much email around.
What sort of limitations does your company have on mailbox size
100MB per user in all active folders, not including archives.
amount of time you can keep mail
Mail is auto deleted after 90 days, auto-archive can run any time before that
and archives
no time limit on archives
Please mention your email platform, type of business, and number of user
Groupwise, healthcare, about 1,500 e-mail accounts. Total storage space is about 1.5TB
Since our small engineering company got bought out by a huge multinational, we lost control of our exchange server and network policies. We used to have a massive quota, but now have an 80MB limit. Everyone is perpetually running near the quota and warning emails from sysadmin are a weekly reminder. Unfortunately we have big word/visio/pdf files that get passed around a lot for various projects. Archiving can help only so much. In a day where google/yahoo freely hand out GB's, our overlords pass on a measly 80MB (120MB for managers, i think). I'm too lazy to setup individual .PST files for each of my folders. Especially since I need to access them so frequently, i know i'd get burned sooner or later. Needless to say I get my viral video clips sent to my gmail acct.
If you think
"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."
Why is this a problem? Storage is cheap. You spent approximately $1 per employee to store their business related e-mail. Put that in perspective. What else can you buy today for $1?
**Warning: Off-Topic**
The only time I use Outlook at work is when I turn on my out of office notification, otherwise I use Mozilla for all my mail needs. What I find weird is that even though I get warnings about being over my mbox size limit from the Exchange server, everything works fine, and I can send and receive e-mail. If for some reason I switch to Outlook, it of course refuses to allow me to send any e-mail. Kinda makes me wonder what's the point of the 'over limit mbox' warnings if enforcement is dependant on the client.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Don't limit their e-mail sizes... simply bill them at certain thresholds. 50mb is free. $5 monthly for every 25MB thereafter. At my company we are billed for shared drive storage, e-mail storage and long-term archiving. Warnings do nothing. If you have to build and support more servers/storage well then someone should pay for it. When team leads and supervisors start seeing the charges they will either pay (and then you upgrade to accomadate their now-justified business need) or they will curtail their employees e-mail ways. The IT department should not be unjustly supporting people's bad habits. When it comes to people's wallets you'll see a quicker response by taking then asking.
...on my home PC. And then some. What are you worried about?
Um, you can leave them in your inbox without pressing a key at all.
... sad though it may seem.
/var; find . -mtime +180 -type f|xargs rm -f
1) get qmail bounce message - "no space left on device"
2) ssh mailserver.ourcompany.com
3) cd
Here are 2 archiving solutions. I work for a law firm and lawyers use Outlook for storage. We currently have a 350 MB size limit but quite a few partners exceed that and there's not a whole lot we can do to prevent that other than remind them with and email stating their mailbox is over the limit.
.pst files. I'm sure there's other solutions out there.
These 2 can move email and attachments to cheaper storage and the user doesn't know it's been moved, other than the icon next to the message. They click on the email and it opens. This eliminates
Veritas' KVS
EMC's Lagato
Novell Groupwise.
Say no more. Its diabolical.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I work for a company with a workforce in excess of 160,000. Everyone has an inbox on one of many Exchange servers. The total allowed storage on the Exchange server was 10MB when I joined the company and has recently been raised to 15MB. This space includes all components of the standard Exchange mail account including deleted items and the calendar (actually the calendar can be a major source of hidden usage if people attached large documents to meeting requests). Each user also has 500MB of personal space outside the Exchange in which they can archive or create personal folders. As you can imagine "Inbox full" messages are not that hard to come by.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
My email is backed up daily, is searchable, and provides a nice indexed (by date/sender/subject) record of my work.
Exactly - I encourage users to keep important emails on the server (ie, not archived locally) for precisely this reason.
You have to make it work (implementation and permissions) but in many scenarios it is a good choice.
Our standard corporate users have the following restrictions on e-mail:
- E-mail files are limited to between 30 and 500 MB, depending on job function and line of business. The average user has a 100 or 200 MB file limit.
- If a user exceeds this limit, all incoming and outgoing e-mail is "locked" (spooled and held) until the file is reduced back into compliance.
- No e-mail message may be kept for greater than one year from it's addition to the file. After one year, e-mails are automatically deleted.
- No e-mail message may be printed, saved, replicated, or other duplicated for the purposes of long-term storage. E-mails may be printed for normal day-to-day, but may not be filed in hardcopy format.
- Laptop users may not replicate their e-mail files locally. All e-mail must be accessed online from the server.
Of course, exceptions to these policies exist for groups with regulatory requirements for message retention, such as investment bankers. Additionally, customer interactions via e-mail are subject to a completely different set of rules - this is the just the ruleset for the average employee without much direct customer interaction.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.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Lotus Notes, 75M soft limit, no hard limit. Some users (read: management) have multi-gig mailboxes. Official policy is to ask people to archive their mail to separate NSF files which are then stored on file servers where the corporate Notes system cannot back up, see, or compact them. Except that because the data MIGHT be personal, they can't store them on the corporate areas of the file servers. And the personal areas of the file servers are limited to 45M, including system and setup files, and usually only have about 20M free. So policy is to tell people to store their archives on their C: drives, so that they'll be 'lost' every time the user moves desks, and blown away every time a PC hard disk craps out. And they're not backed up. And the mailbox limits aren't enforced anyway. We work in the federal government. But you probably guessed that already.
We impose a limit of 5mb for an attachment and up to 50mb in mailbox size. Limits can be lifted if you can give a good business reason. This is quite strict but we also encourage the use of PSTs. Again as mentioned in other posts this leads to some serious archiving, our worst offender currently has around 8Gb of PSTs, the other problem we have is that once a PST goes over 1Gb its stability seems to be effected and can (and often does) just fall over. Platform: Exchange 2000 (Migrating to 2003) Type of business: Pharma Users: 3000+ accross 2 servers on our local site. Worldwide 100,000+ users.
I - like many of my colleagues - archive almost every mail. Why? Because we live in a highly political organization where an old mail can save your butt.
So (because we have an arbitrary 50MB mailbox limit) when I archive I have to make a copy of everything to my (HUGE 50GB) set of PST file. I say set because PST files are not terribly reliable when they get big. This is disadvantage #1.
On to #2 - Because many of the mails we receive are to multiple users - we now explode the amount of storage that is required. Why? Because Exchange does a reasonable job of ensuring that a mail with a 1MB attachment to 500 users only keeps one copy of the attachment. Guess what happens when we all archive it to a PST? Yep - 500MB.
On to #3 We use OWA (the web front end to Exchange). When I'm using this I no longer have access to my PSTs - because they're on my shared drive. This sucks.
So PLEASE - all you Exchange admins. STOP putting dumb limits on your Exchange storage. We're going to use that storage anyway - it's just somewhere else.
We have a 95 MB soft limit with a 100 MB hard limit, so usually I hit the bounce point before I even know I am there.
And why does Exchange expect you to delte email twice? Retarded.
I POP my stuff to my local machine (14 GB and counting, including all spam in my old trash folders) but the stuff I send
Large networking products company, about 40,000 employees running on Exchange. My mailbox is limited to 350MB. At 300MB it stops sending email. PowerPoint is very popular here and I routinely receive 20MB attachments. Outlook Attachment Sniffer (http://www.rsbr.de/Software/OASniffer/index_eng.h tm) has saved my life. I've regained at least an hour or two each week in time spent saving attachments to disk manually. It's worth a look if you have a problem managing your mailbox size and use Exchange.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Sounds fishy to me...
Why do you need to know the type of business conducted?
40 mb limit for sysadmin whine message
.pst to dump overflow until it used up all my personal drive space on the server.
50 mb limit for sorry you can't send email until you shed some messages
weekly automatic clean up of older mail messages (inbox and sent items) [currently deleting messages from december/beginning of January]
I am always cruising the limit. At one time had set up a
I'm surprised most of the replies actually are from people who's companies set a limit. These must be pretty small companies. I work for a relatively large health care provider. By the time an email hits our inbox, there are already three copies of it (the main email system, a backup, and a SAN). Then we do offsite storage later. The last time I knew actual numbers we had a dozen or so TB's total, just for email. We are talking Lotus Notes, with a system of somewhere around 30000 employees. There are no limits on mailbox size, and there never have been. They do chastise you once every year or so if your mailbox is over some arbitrary number (last time their pseudo-limit was 1GB). But even if we delete our email, it is never really deleted, and we have an online search utility to get our deleted email back, so we don't even have to go to an admin for a restore. Basically any email ever sent or received is saved forever, and there are at least three copies of it. This is due to various compliancy and regulatory laws (HIPPA, PHI related stuff, lawyers recommendation, etc). The sheer size of the individual mailboxes is due in part to executable files being sent around, but mainly due to a meeting prone company with large documents such as visio's, project files, spreadsheets, etc. Our original installation of lotus notes did not index an attachment as a link to each inbox that received it (so every individual would receive their own individual copy of that attachment). Feel luck that you have such a small problem to deal with. Our Notes support team adds additional disk to the environment almost quaterly.
Man... I thought we were in bad shape!
We have our IS limits set at:
- 450MB warn
- 500MB no send
- 550MB no receive
There is a single exception for a mailbox related to an application. No single user is an exception to the rule. With that said, we have 200GB - 300GB of PSTs floating about. The 1,000 users are split between 4 Exchange 5.5 servers to ease recovery times. The largest has a 40GB IS while the smallest has 30GB. We don't have an official recovery SLA, though it's our unofficial policy to restore mail flow first and old data second.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
I work for a large newspaper, we use iPlanet messenger express and limit our users to 40mb each of storage, we have ~1200 users. it forces them to clean out attachments and manage their email themselves.
An Exchange backup using the Windows Backup tool (ewww) will reduce the size of the exchange stores by abour 20-30% in my experience. It must be a transaction log or similar which is cleaned out by the Windows backup program. Saved me a lot of hassle anyway!
Very simple policy: Nothing in or out that'd embarass you, the company or any one else directly, written or implied . NDA meens NDA. Simple subjects for tags: Juest wondering, Idea, and I need/want/have etc to know/understand/help with ____ (person, place or thing.) No pron unless she's cute and the boss is sent a copy. Oh and don't email anything larger than what you wouldn't mind having sent back to you as an atachment or idea. This worked well. Only had one or two abusers of the system, and they didn't long. Only before I left did they also add a Amsimov style iRobot adendum: I will not wilfully, directly or indirectly cause harm. I will protect myself as well as anyone I work for, if I don't know difer to rul 1, and I will forward it to yahoo and open it their. From what I understand is this helps. For one thing everyone then has a sense of buy in. They undertand what good maners are. They have a defacto safe harder to make a through away yahoo acount, and pluasable deniability. Though these days gmail works great. Also have you considered the best general corprate rule for e-mail: I will delete all email older than x days?
250 Mb limit on storage, 10 Mb send/receive limit, none on storage time, ~400 users, exchange 2003, mining industry. You need to take the hard line early, and stick to it or suffer unwieldy archives (and hard disk space might be cheap in the consumer market, RAID/scsi hardware and backup devices and maintenance aren't) and impossible restore time as you mention. No exceptions; those only breed more exceptions.
All users have CDRWs, archiving is encouraged (if rarely done)
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
We're a distributor of industrial "stuff". We're using Exchange for email. Our salesmen try to use their email accounts for all kinds of crap in addition to getting dozens to hundreds of emails each every day. We regularly delete pr0n, music and all sorts of stuff from their accounts. We don't have a posted size limit (we should) and just force the worst abusers to delete stuff or archive it to a network drive. Mostly we just delete the old stuff and they never notice. We not so gently remind our users that its the company's mail and server and the "company" can delete that stuff if it needs to do so. We probably need a more stringent published policy. The hard part is getting someone high enough in management to enforce it. Until someone above the IT department makes a policy and enforces it, its just gonna be a continuing headache.
One thing that has helped us deal with the crap these guys email and download are our new firewalls. We just installed Fortinet boxes at HQ and at all the branches. http://www.fortinet.com/
These boxes (called Fortigates by Fortinet) are very easy to configure and don't cost too much. They have a nice web interface and work with Fortinet's subscription service. The subsription service provides AV defs, whitelist and blacklist for web addresses and email etc. The boxes are really do-it-all solutions. We could have done the same thing via a do-it-ourselves Linux box, but the folks that have traditionally supported the firewalls here, while linux-friendly, don't have the time to install and configure something like that from scratch. Plus there would be the nagging worry that we had mis-configured something, leaving a nasty security risk. The Fortinet firewall appliances have taken care of that worry. AFAIK, Fortigates run a Linux distro with proprietary "bits and pieces" added in.
The Fortigates have cut down on the trash that gets downloaded as well as the junk mail the sales types were getting from web sites they shouldn't (and now can't) go to in the first place.
This sig kills fascists.
Of course you could save a lot of money and look at a Wiki instead...
I work for a Fortune 100 company, 30,00+ employees. Exchange/Outlook.
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.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
System: Exchange Users: 2000+ Type of business: University Mailbox limit: 50 MB (increased to 75 or 100 MB if they say pretty please), they stop receiving email at 50 MB, can't send at 100 MB. Attachment limit: 7 MB Archives are stored locally...so no limit there. No limit on the amount of time you can keep mail. There are lots of restrictions on file extensions of attachments.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
We have a 20mb attachment limit, mainly for performance reasons (we virus scan inbound and outbound), but we do not have any storage limits for our 120 users.
Storage is cheap these days, and it's a lot easier to allow users to keep everything on our CommuniGate Pro server than it is to tell them their local Outlook archive file is corrupt and their "extremely important email" is gone.
My company has a 250 MB restriction on email storage. Problem is, they don't tell you how much space you are using until you are over the limit.
Microsoft inbox limit is 180 MB. Pretty small by modern standards.
You mention that mail is now being stored in .pst files. In my opinion that's a horrible solution.
.pst files you basically hand over the archival of mail to the users. In a business where e-mail is an essential tool this seems unacceptable. All mail should stay on there corporate mail server.
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".
"420 GB mail store for 320 users"
Woot?! Running some kind of ISO mailing list there or what?
Seriously thou, time to introduce mr.13_gigs_of_email to the DELETE button.
We have 50 MB per user on a Lotus Notes system. I think that this is a US Dept. of Agriculture limit but it might be just for my agency, USDA Forest Service. A bad thing is that attachments count and virtually NO ONE compresses anything and many senders elect to keep the attachments as they reply. Often messages set to all of us are sent to us again by supervisors and administrator who don't notice how they are addressed. All of this tends to fill the mail box quickly.
I think we are allowed up to 1 mb of attachments on incoming messages (perhaps on outgoing as well) from outside the intranet and 5 mb for the rest. My experience is that it is difficult to save a message off line from Notes. When I "Save As" the formatting is always lost.
Nate
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 or even Bugzilla 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.
Come on folks, an Apple Xserve RAID costs less than $1 per GB, by way of example.
While attaching huge binaries may not seem reasonable to us ubergeeks, it is perfectly reasonable for non-expert users to expect this, and $10 per user is less hassle than arguing about space limits, and even easier than expllaining over and over again to the typical dummy or two in every organization that can't save their mail.
You can always reject large binary attachments in real-time, both sending and receiving, that keeps them from emailing the NBA plyoffs to each other.
Worse yet, so-called Sarbanes-Oxley experts are running around telling everyone that they need to save all email, forever. It's inexplicable that modern MUAs can't just automatically deal with this kind of thing. Maybe there are a few than can, but most of the world is a whore to Outlook.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Most organizations have a 100MB to 500MB limit. They also check if pst files are stored on the network - they're not supposed to be.
Have a bureaucratic approval process that charges back to the department requiring a larger storage space. Once people realize it is not free, they suddenly become more careful with the resources.
My rhetorical point: RAID is cheap.
If your lawyers want to to keep all email forever, buy a tape drive.
List for XServe raid: 7TB, $13K. 3.5TB, $8,5K.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
http://www.veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&refI d=322
I work for a fortune 100 company in the financial industry. We support ~180K mailboxes internationally on an Exchange 2003 infrastructure. Currently we have a default mailbox limit of 100MB, but there are always exceptions for people with legitimate business reasons (usually people who regularly receive large emails concerning topics that involve financial gain). As of now we require that everyone else either clean out their mailboxes or archive their emails to PST. This poses another problem because for legal reasons we also have a 90-day retention policy that requires that all emails over 90 days old be deleted.
In order to regain control of all corporate email we are actively researching a solution that will allow users to automatically or manually have their emails moved from their Exchange store to a system that will act as an extension of our mail stores. Ideally users would be able to store their emails for much longer (say a year or two years) and we would be able to manually force a deletion at that time. Through extensive research we've been able to comfortably say that greater than 85-90% of emails that have been in someone's mailbox for 30+ days are not touched again, and that number increases to >99% after 60 days, thus making the overhead on such a system much less taxing than the overhead on an active Exchange server. The major hardware cost would be in the form of disk space, which is a relatively cheap commodity these days. We would also have a policy in place that restricts the creation of PSTs.
There are a few companies like NetApp and Computer Associates who have products available, but the technology (and theory for that matter) is in its infancy. TBC...
Most of my customers, very large companies, limit Exchange mailstores to 50MB to 75MB for Joe User. His boss gets a little more with 100MB.
I'm not at all surprise with 420GB for 320 people. I come across users often that have very large PST files. These 750MB to over 1GB PST's tend to belong to managers that insist on keeping everything, even mail that is 3 to 4 years old.
Some of our accounts are implement manditory email deletion. This is all part of a bigger minimal archiving policy to protect the company from future legal action.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
We're Notes users, with tight (warning @ 50mb, cut off at 70mb) quota's. As an architectural firm, our user receive a lot of large email attachments, but we find this limit to work great.
The idea is to 'encourage' users to process their mail, file (complete with attachments) it to an email repository specific to the project the mail relates to, and delete it from their mail files.
This has a number of benefits.
* Because the limit is so small, users never get to that 'Im so overwhelemed, I cant possibly begin to sort out 1Gb of email' freak-out...where nothing ever gets resolved and things just get worse.
* As people work in teams, all mail relating to a project should be viewable to all team members. This way, if they are accidently left off a CC list and the scope of the job changes, they are still in the loop.
* Our email repositories are managed so that mail saved there cannot be deleted by anyone without admin priv's. No more angry employees deleting all the records after a bad review...or even by accident.
Incomming and outgoing maximum size limits are set to 10mb, once again very low.
This is to encourage the use of Extranets (think FTP with pretty graphics) for transfering large files. Outside consultants recieve an email telling them the new content has been posted to the extranet so they can download at will.
I've been in companies with multi-Gb email users, and know how difficult they can be to deal with.
"BUT I NEED IT ALL. IT'S REALLLLY IMPORTANT"...uh...yeah...sure....
I've always found their biggest issue with culling their mail is simply overload. They just dont know where to start.
"Sure, HD space is cheap these days, just throw another TB at it, it'll be ok"....but there's more to the issue.
How do you expect a user to easily find data in 2Gb+ mail file, when they might be lucky to remember the sender, or the subject...if anything at all?!
"Help! I need to find a mail from some guy about something from last year...in 5 minutes for a meeting"
And never forget, that since they cant find the data they need in the email system...it's YOUR fault.
There's more to being an IT manager than just IT. If you're at that place where you're saying to yourself "I think I might need to start managing this situation before it all goes pear shaped" then it's time to start doing it.
Because things are only going to get worse.
WPS = Whatever Pedro Says.
I force them to dowload to their mail clients. If your mailbox grows too much, and you are not either the president or the ceo (small shop, the ceo and president are a married couple) then your old mail will start disappearing.
The best part is when I don't tell them, and months pass with no complaints, which means that once the mail is downloaded to their client they never bother to check their web mail.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
1. You'll get 10 megs and LIKE IT!!!!
2. If you hit your 10 meg limit, empty your Sent and Trash folders!!
3. If you empty those folders and still are at your 10 meg limit, save ALL attachments to your home directory ("G Drive")!!
4. If you can't get well below your 10 meg limit, then you can ask your supervisor to request more space from IT. But you must justify that your request is work related, or else... (we can read your mail)
5. Deny all users access to HTML mail
6. Do not provide support for anything other than a web based mail client
So far it's worked fine. I have 2000 mail users in a 13 gig mail store. They may not like it. But it works.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
and one likely to encourage good habits, is to use shared network folders and shared mailboxes. Each project gets a dedicated folder where latest versions can be stored, backed up, referenced and version controlled if necessary.
Shared mail folders easily allows users to chuck drag across stuff that might be useful later, whilst not having to personally look after it.
Usual problem is that 10 people get cc'd the same attachment - but nobody wants to delete it 'just in case' it's required.
When projects finish the whole folder can just be backed up neatly somewhere leaving a nice centralised record.
Back in the VMS days I had a user who filed all his read email in the trash. You exited the VMS mail client a-la binmail - ^Q/"quit" exited without emptying the trash and ^X/"exit" exited and empltied the trash (or vice versa, whatever.)
This dumbass usually exited with ^Q but about once per quarter would accidentally exit with ^X and I woudl have to restore his Trash from tape. He did this OVER AND OVER again as long as I worked there.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I don't run the system, I just whinge about it:
.doc files or .ppt files all the time it doesn't take long to fill the mailbox.
Exchange 2000 servers, 20000+ employees
10mb *per user*
It's terribly small, and when everybody is sending around Word
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
I've got personal accounts on various boxen with various quotas, but they all bounce to Gmail.
My work mail also bounces to Gmail.
My not-exactly-work mail (at a nonprofit) lives on an Exchange server. It's the only account I have that can't be *trivially* bounced to Gmail... and it's also got a stupidly small quota, about 250MB if I recall. This is "stupidly small" in part because my role within the organization involves dealing with large digital images, and also because it's not at all uncommon to be sent PDFs of a document in three different languages every night for a week...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
We've got 20 MB of email storage space. If I carefully clean my mailbox, move my sent items, and then go on vacation more than a couple of days, I'm blocked out; I'll miss lots of important stuff when I get back. Sometimes it's full over the course of a weekend -- our vendors just assume that this is the 21st century and 8MB PowerPoint presentations (as a container for photographs, of course) are no big deal. It's a shame I have to give out my gmail address to get some things, especially when my areas of responsibility are Latin America and I can't just drive there to take a look at a problem.
So the details you were looking for:
Windows XP (for most of us, some legacy Win2K boxes out there).
Outlook -- I just got the corporate Office 2003 load today, but there's still a lot of XP and 2000 loads out there.
Exchange server (of course) -- don't know the version.
Industry -- automobiles (not the "auto biz"; we build and sell automobiles; we're big).
Employees -- Many, many, many, many thousands.
Aside from the mailbox size limit (that's 20MB of server space including calendaring and contacts) there's no expiry or anything of messages. You can leave them there forever as long as your NT ID is active in the company. We use the PST feature on our local hard drives, and *I* run a backup script everyone night against company policy to make sure it (and all of my documents) are backed up on our private network drives. That's not the non-policy part; we're supposedly forbidden from having PST's on our personal network drives (and MP3 and photos and installers and non-business stuff). We get email warnings all the time warning that our server is low on space and to please clean up.
My PST (yeah, I only keep one) is about a gig, and I clean it regularly, especially for old attachments. There's *way* to much to do a thorough cleaning of non-important stuff (I trash it as I come across it), but there's way too much stuff that I'll need to reference in the future just to trash it all. I would be unmanageable if it weren't for Google Desktop Search (and the fact that I got an exception to have an unpolicied machine to install it).
Aside from needing to send and receive large attachments (this is the car biz), I have lots and lots of business contacts, and I don't have time to transcribe them all perfectly into Outlooks contacts, so I like to scan them in and store the business card with the contact. Of course since I want universal access to my contacts, I can't store these in my PST. Additionally I want to store certain attachments in my calendar appointments. I'm smart enough to delete them later, but a lot of my colleagues wonder why empty inboxes and sent items still have them at 18MB of mailbox usage.
If I had gigs and gigs of space, I might be tempted to use it all, and I can see that being a problem, especially in a company our size. The current 20MB just plain sucks, though, and I don't see why a happy medium of maybe 1/2 a gig couldn't be accomodated. Hell, I'd be 400% happier with just a 100% increase in space.
--Jim (me)
Well... that's the biggest restriction (imposed today of all days!), but this is academia, and everyone downloads their mail, so the ~30 MB online storage allocation is not used - everyone just downloads their email to their laptops and lab computers.
start reading their mail. forward tasty tidbits site-wide.
watch as mailboxes shrink quickly
I work at a company with over 100k employees. We use Exchange and have mailbox sizes capped at 25MB. They encourage local PST files, but that isn't always desirable if you're frequently moving between PCs and need access to e-mail everywhere. The people in that unfortunate category have to rely heavily on automatic filters and manual screening to make sure they can squirrel away attachments or important messages somewhere that doesn't impact their Exchange quota.
In practice, this is a huge headache for this class of user. I can't count the number of times I've needed an e-mail from someone, or needed to send someone an e-mail, where the quota system was preventing the e-mail from being created/sent. The recipients would have to wait for a while until the sender could find the time to clean up their mail box.
Looking at the other responses, we seem to be on the exceptionally low end of the size restriction. In practice, we're spending an awful lot of time trying to stay below that minimum. Given that hard disks are so cheap, I have to seriously wonder if the people coming up with these things have ever heard of a cost-benefit analysis.
Quotas are good. But bad quotas are bad. If someone has a legitimate need to hold on to a lot of large things, buy the storage to let them do that. If they can't justify a legitimate need, set a quota low enough to be reasonable but high enough so that they're not spending all of the company's time/money keeping their mailbox cleaned up. Don't follow our lead with the one-size-fits-all-except-upper-management mold.
~1200 users
100 meg standard limit. Some users have more.
25 meg transfer limit
keep deleted email 7 days, purged mailbox 30 days
Keep the stores at 35 gig or smaller for a 4 hr recovery window... We put that on a 40 gig lun. If you lose the partition you only lose the one store.
If you're using Veritas Netbackup, seperate all of your store backups into seperate jobs or you have to read through many more gigs of data to get 1 store back, and then do it again if you've lost more than one store.
Multi gig mailboxes are stupid. Exchange is NOT a filestore!
Two words for you:
:)
Sarbanes. Oxley.
Forced recordkeeping is quickly making network and storage people very, very happy.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I work for a very, very large church in columbus, ohio, in the I.T. department. We have just over 400 employees, and we run MS Exchange Server 2003. When I arrived on the scene, they here having space issues just like you described. Being highly experienced in exchange, I knew there were other issues too that they may have just assumed were unavoidable. I instituted a 20 megabyte rule for each email message. I know this is high, but there is a publications department that sends and receives huge images and documents to and from venders for publication purposes. Anything larger than that, we force them to use FTP. Beyond that, most people who had the larger email boxes, we learned were keeping email to cover themselves from responsibilty, i.e. - so and so said to do this so I did it, and I kept the email to prove it just in case. At any rate, I also instituted a rule that will delete all email after 180 days (6 months). No archiving. It isn't that having the information in email form is bad. If it's something they really need to keep, the employees are instructed to back it up in local archives on their computers by dragging the EML file out of outlook to their desktop. Combined, these rules have helped to ensure higher speeds within the exchange server and have made the 5 emails servers we had under exchange 2000 more managable and have allowed us to reduce down to 1, with just under a hundred gigs.
Nothing.
Not even spam. *
Our biggest mailbox is somewhere around 25GB, but several users have had problems when their boxes get that big and we have split them into several mailboxes - johnsmith, johnsmith2, johnsmith3, etc. Total mail space just for our office is about 2TB. The good thing is that users all have separate mail files, so backup/restore are user-based instead of server-based.
What sort of limitations does your company have on:
Lotus Notes, warehousing & distribution, ~400 users.
* - We can filter spam before it gets into the system, but once it's made it into someone's inbox it's stuck there.
You should have a file (real physical one or a document in your computer, or both) documenting the relationship with a client.
Any useful information that shows up on an email should be incorporated in the file.
emails are the less efficient way to keep the corporate culture alive, specially if your best search tool is Outlooks' find facility.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We have many different physical locations and exchange servers, but at my location I am the Exchange admin among many other things. At my site we have about 650 user email boxes (plus many resource boxes). We delete all mail on the server older than 60 days (legal reasons) and attempt to impose a 100MB/user limit (performance reasons). Before trying to implement some restrictions on mailbox size there were multiple email boxes over 1GB even with the 60 day retention policy, which means these people averaged over 500MB of email a month. I certainly see how someone could arrive at a 13GB email box at this rate.
Users are allowed to archive email to PST files at our location, but this is not consistent across the corporation. Some sites do not allow archiving at all. All sites have server enforced 60 day retention policies, so I do not agree with the policy that people lose their email so quickly and can't save it anywhere. PST (archived email) files, however, must be stored on PC hard drives that are not backed up by IT. Again, this is for legal reasons.
Our Exchange server is not officially backed up, and our official policy is that should it die we start from scratch and everyone loses everything on it. In reality I do rotating backups that are retained for 1 day so that I can cover myself if the server should die. Somehow I don't think that even though the order came down to me from above that I would be off scott free should the server die and I not be able to restore it.
In spite of people knowing their email is not backed up and is deleted after 60 days, some people still refuse to cooperate with the quota by archiving their email quickly and cite many different reasons, but most commonly that they just receive too many attachments. I realize this is an educational problem, but we are full of highly technical and highly educated people who we cater to, and we should since they are the ones that pay the bills, not the IT staff.
In the article's case, there should be some sort of compromise. Those mailbox sizes are too big, but depending on your users, you will probably have to compromise and provide them with some alternative means of storing information in email form. Some people apparently just organize better in an email box than they do on a filesystem.
I work at a major financial services firm (50k+ exchange accounts). We have regulatory requirements to archive ALL e-mail, so we use a third party to manage that (written to write-once media and vaulted forever). Therefore, since the emails are stored there, they don't need to be stored on exchange -- users just download them to their own local .pst and go from there.
.psts (i heard rumors that .pst files > a gig or so tend to get corrupted...)
I'm sure there are some users who max our their hard drives with huge
The company I work at, BestBuy, has about 800 stores with about 30 people from each store with a company email address. You get about a 2MB mailbox before it locks you out of your email, and you have to change your password once every 2 weeks. Anybody can send you an email, but you can only check it from within the intranet using their web interface through their employee toolkit, or any computer attached to the intranet. Feel free to ask questions.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Reasonable enough... I copy stuff to local once I hit the limit. I think the hard limit is actually really high, I just get an email every few hours once I'm above the soft limit (it used to be every few days, when the quota was 100 MB) so I did something about it.
13 GB on the server... someone needs to clean some stuff up. People won't do it until you make them... and often have no idea that that 10 meg attachment that they send to 30 people takes up 300 MB on the server.
Oh, you could pay EMC like $1M to use Centera to "single instance" that (or use Exchange single instancing) but that's a lot of work with multiple exchange servers, so must people just throw more storage at the problem. A real b*tch with NetApp prices, we use Xserve RAIDs and mirror them as it's about 1/10 the price/GB as NetApp or CX 300/500/700.
I'm a graphic artist for a newspaper, and everybody has a 4mb limit on their inbox. Clients can send e-mails with large attachments to a separate address, which strips it of the attachment, puts it on an FTP, and notifies us in the creative dept, where we can download it and clear it from the server.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
We provide e-mail to a few thousand domains and know this feeling very well. The question becomes when is too much too much?
At one point, POP was king and there was no other way. Dialup connections were the norm for most home users and some business, yet alone 8k ISDN lines for other business. Someone sending an e-mail of more than a megabyte was unusual, as it would take 10 minutes of transfer in order to send to the server. Files often went out on discs and a few MB was thousands of e-mails most commonly. Digital photography also barely existed.
Flash forward to today- most cable connections can easily do 50KB/s upstream and 350KB/s downstream. More offices are dumping expensive T1s in favour of DSL and Cable 'business' offerings. Sending pictures of your vacation at 8MegPixels without any resizing isn't uncommon... to your entire address book.
The war for 'more space' by Webmail providers have left users _expecting_ gigabytes. Hotmail went from 2MB to 10MB and all the way to 1GB in a couple years. GMail came in at 1GB. Yahoo is now up around 1GB as well... and that's all for free. Just imagine how much space you could use otherwise?
People don't want mail on their computer's anymore. Tons of our personal and small business users are simply heading to webmail systems like Horde and not leaving them. They're becoming DHTML applications rather than simple 'on the go' web frontends for basic functionality. People expect their mail to be everywhere and work from anywhere.
So now onto topic- We have some users that use POP accounts and have a few MB in their inbox at any time. We have users who use webmail/imap and clean up regularly, archiving only a few mail messages. Finally we have people who are storing gigabytes on mail systems with 15KRPM discs with every attachment they've ever recieved.
I regularly get calls complaining that our 25MB message size limit is too low and people are reaching it. I have customers sending CAD drawings and engineering programs across the world creating huge spikes in any transfer graph (which at 95th percentile... well anyway).
So who are you to say 'too much'? It's whatever the business need justifies. I store archives of customer requests for some time, as I often reference them. Who's to say that people need or don't need what they have? It's based on their business and their mail habbits.
Common strategies for forcing positive behaviour:
- regularly (monthly) strip attachments off of old (>a few years) e-mail
- remove old sent items for a few years back or archive them into another system that could be a lower priority restore.
- expire old messages and be sure to purge/pack regularly... those PST files will always keep growing, maintaining history and archive information.
Essentially, the admin usually can't say "this is too much" unless they know the user need to it. Some customers, for legal reasons, need the request and attachment for 1MM widgets just in case...
You never know.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I've seen hundreds of Exchange shops ranging from tiny little companies to big companies. The vast majority these days have limits in the 100-250MB range with exceptions for certain folks (always for executives, sometimes for specific positions that can justify it). The limit on the size of emails has gradually increased in the last few years from what used to be the standard of 10MB to now 25MB - that is becoming more and more common.
My strong suspicion is that the person responsible for data recovery on your Exchange servers has not tested a restore recently. In one shop that I worked at with 35,000 users we found that the sweet spot for the size of a database (not a storage group) was 20-25GB. Your mileage will vary of course. About a year and a half ago I talked to the guys that run Exchange at Microsoft and their database limit was in the same range. You still have to have a well-executed restore strategy and the necessary hardware to support this but it is manageable.
The amount of data you have is alarming to the average Exchange admin. It doesn't mean what you are doing is wrong but it is often helpful for management to know how far out of the mainstream it is - many consulting gigs I've had are primarily focused on management's questions about what other people are doing so they can make sense of their own needs in comparison. I've deployed Exchange systems where every user gets unlimited storage (against my best advice) and in most cases the end result was a nightmare (either the databases become so large that a restore would take days which isn't acceptable to most businesses or the admins have to constantly move mailboxes around to juggle the space which becomes a significant drain on resources.
Good luck.
We're not allowed to send any .zip files because they could contain viruses. I even tried to send an empty zip file and it blocked it.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Still using Exchange 5.5 and all applicable post-SP4 hotfixes. Seriously reading up on http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/i ndex.xml and maintaining all Outlook functionality. 15MB email size limit. Spam filtering on an IIS smtpsvc gateway (before and on arrival points) keeps the crap away from Exchange via configurable DNSBL's, HELO format, MX or A record check, SPF1 lookups, Greylisting, tarpitting, regex black/whitelists, content and attachment filtering:
.*\.(ade|adp|ani|app|asp|asx|bas|bat|bin|chm|clp|c md|com|cpl|crt|csh|dll|emf|exe|fxp|hhp|hiv|hlp|hta |htb|if|inf|ins|isp|its|job|js|jse|jtd|ksh|lnk|mad |maf|mag|mam|maq|mar|mas|mat|mau|mav|maw|mda|mde|m dt|mdw|mdz|mht|msc|msi|msp|mst|nws|ocx|oft|ops|ovl |pcd|pif|pl|plx|prf|prg|reg|scf|scr|sct|sh|shb|shs |swf|sys|tmp|url|vb|vbe|vbs|vsmacros|vss|vst|vsw|v xd|wmf|wmz|ws|wsc|wsf|wsh|xsl)$
All of these are replaced with custom text message. Media file types are huge and not work related.
I also tell my co-workers to use YouSendIt, Dropload, Filefactory, Mailbigfile, etc, so the personal stuff is stored elsewhere.
I am constantly amazed at how businesses accept email as a valid form of document management. Unfortunately, from a user perspective, its just about perfect for this but from an IT/risk management perspective its one of the most evil practices. Inefficient, high risk and difficult to properly index unless your google.
:)
That said, I've got 2 GB in mine
and we have a 250MB cap for the teachers. We're thinking about moving over to hotmail or gmail with your domain, though, since we get a lot more storage without the cost.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
One of our helpdesk clients has about 3000 employees. They recently implemented storage limits of 300M per user (there were non before). If someone wants more the helpdesk is happy to show them how to use local PST files for archiving, etc. Most users have no idea how big their boxes are, and practically none thought their deleted items and sent items folders contributed towards these limits.
:)
Once you show them how, most users are also happy to change their tune from "But I NEED a 600M limit" to "this is manageable, thanks." Sales people are the worst, as usual, but the policy is company-wide and there are no exceptions, not even for VPs. I don't know about the president, because he's never called
The unclassified Canadian military email system has 60,000 seats spread out all acrose the country and abroad with hundreds of servers. There is a limit of 40 megs for each user's network drive. You can set up unlimited personal folders on your local drive and move email but if you go away for a couple weeks you risk reaching your limit and then all mail is bounced back to the sender. Attachments are limited to 3 megs. I hear they decided on a 40 meg limit not just to save server space but to keep bandwidth demands down. Some remote sites are still only connected with a 56k modem. Not ideal but it seems to work.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
17,000 employees running on Exchange 2003. By default they have 100MB mailbox limits. They're required to use Personal Folders (.PST files) or simply go without records. There is no attachment size limit. When user's get to 100+MB they are still able to receive - their incoming messages are *never* rejected. Every message they try to send out, however, is undeliverable due to them being in excess. User's are allowed to request a 50MB size increase, but beyond that are SOL. We highly encourage \ require archive files.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It sounds as if the biggest concern is the availibility of e-mail archives at any given moment. Given the number of users and general indications that e-mail services are a valuable tool at your workplace, you could easily make a case for spending $3-$6 per user to setup enough redundancy to allow for you to switch to a backup server if the primary server kicks the bucket. Think in terms of three 400GB disks in RAID 5 on each server and a 1000Mb link between the two to keep them syncronized.
If you're currently worried about restore times then you probably already have a tape backup system in place for long term/off site storage. In the event of an act of god type event, (i.e. flood, fire, earthquake, Duke Nukem Forever going gold, etc.) You're boss(es) will be concerned with mitigating damage from so many different directions that you likely won't get any more heat from them than, let's say, the contractor that they had to hire to replace the roof that just doesn't seem to be there anymore.
If most of your users are using the system primarily for work related tasks, then don't try to entertain the delusion that they need to be re-educated or artificially restricted. Your job should be as transparent as possible to Paul Powerpoint in marketing and Susy Spreadsheet in accounting.
Stay away from the user education routine until you start seeing usage that is blatently innapropriate or dangerous. Put a quick stop to people sharing cute little joke executables since they may contain virii or could just be poorly written enough to cause a crash and a loss of unsaved work (which you will then have to try to rescue). Also put a stop to or properly escalate instances of pornographic, abusive or harassing e-mail. Do not try to stop people from sharing vacation or family photos, funny stories or other water-cooler content as those items are often an indication of a good functioning team and should not be overly discouraged so long as such usage is within reasonable limits. If such usage becomes unreasonable, as in large uncompressed photos and hi-res movies, have a little sit down with that person at their desk and show them how to save a little space while telling them that it will help you to make sure that they can still share those things in the future.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
50 mb mailboxes on exchange servers. Multiple terabytes of PST files on network drives. It works about as good as square wheels.
... and it was hell.
We have 285 mailboxes on Exchange (was 2000, now 2003) and are in the telecom business. We implemented 2003 with a cross-server migration using the mailbox move utility and we went from an unlicensed version of 2000 Enterprise to a licensed version of Standard. Who knew we had an 87 GB mailstore? After I had migrated five users, the mailstore dismounted and the event log told me there was 17 GB out of 16 in use on the mailstore. Apparantly, Standard has a 16 GB limit. I also found out about a neat registry setting (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=57029) that enables a 75 GB limit, but that was still too small for our 87 GB store. Limits was the key, as we didn't have any.
Our largest user was 1.2 GB, but we had fifteen users over 1 GB. My predecessor had tried to implement a five tiered system based on title. Non managers had 100 MB, Managers had 150 MB, Directors had 200 MB, VPs had 250 MB and Corporate Officers were unlimited. My boss (a director) wanted to half these. I pushed for something more manageable, yet reasonable and here is what we implemented:
Non-managers: 250 MB, Managers: 500 MB, VPs and above: Unlimited. We set it so that warnings were issued at 90%, Send is disabled at 100%, and Send/Recieve is disabled at 110%.
After teaching users that the 'Deleted Items' folder is not the place to store important mail, and setting up daily auto-archive set to two months, our mail store is at 50 GB. It takes four hours to backup individual mailboxes to a locally attached Ultrium LTO2 drive. So far, I haven't had to restore anyone's mailbox, but I would expect the same or faster on the restore.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Currently we have 18000+ users across 20 exchange servers with a standard quota of 10MB per user. The organisation is a bank.
I am in a remote office of a top 25 law firm.
In our office, we have about 275 users and about 600GB for the message stores. The message stores are growing about 5-7GB a week. Slightly higher gain per week since we started delivering faxes straight to email but that has not settled out yet. Our policy is untouched in 2 years and in a default Outlook folder, will be deleted. We highly discourage (borderline do not allow) archiving to pst files because that does not fit well into our retention plan or our storage and recovery plan. We are actually in negotiations with a company for "cheaper and slower" off line storage of older email. Sounds to me like expensive, propietary, and PITA. As with most of these business solutions, the best salesman wins, not always the best process or method. I'll save judgement for when I actually have to deploy and configure it.
For backups, we still do daily fulls and it only takes about 4-5 hours. We maintain 30 days worth of tapes. This is an all fiber solution from san storage to tape via the Exchange server. We are in the process of testing switching over to san disk backups and making an aux copy to tape. We send out tapes daily making same day recovery a little hard. At the moment, our backup and contingency policies are more geared toward catastophic failure like our building falling down or a dirty bomb of some sort and not really based on the recovery ease of casual lost files from someone deleting the wrong stuff with the wrong mouse click. Being a few blocks from both the IMF and the White House probably determined that plan.
Specifics for users? My box is less then anyone in the office and it hovers about 30MB-50MB. We have several users around 15GB and one of them is the IT Manager. We encourage the use of our document management system for documents and not the email system. Our document management system is fully integrated into Outlook and the Windows desktop so dragging and dropping attachments from mail folders is about as painless as it could get. I guess people use that but are also afraid to delete the actual email. We have a 50MB outgoing mail attachment limit as well. I do not remember if that is/was a software limit with Exchange or we set it there.
Although I work in a law firm, IANAL so I have no idea what and how long they are actually required to maintain things but the email system seems like where they do save it.
Our IT department is pretty unforgiving -- can't send at 100MB, can't receive at 150MB. 5MB limit on attachments. Of course there are exceptions, mostly higher ups that we have to kiss ass to anyways. We've got 900 mailboxes on our exchange server, and our full backups are running 65GB or so. Oh, and we're a community college. A very poor and understaffed one.
It's the best way you have of getting a hard upper limit on retention times - the company legal counsel have a far better hope of getting a limit enforced than you ever have, and they'll have a good reason for it.
Remember those embarrassing e-mails that showed up in the Microsoft anti-trust trial? You can bet that given the wrong lawsuit, even if there's nothing illegal in there, there WILL BE stuff in your companys e-mail archives that would damage the companys reputation, damage you a lawsuit (even if just because some morons in sales were stupid and brash and made silly claims in an e-mail or wrote stuff like "we'll CRUSH the f*ckers!!! World domination! Muahahah" in a fit of motivation - it will be exploited, even if only for a PR win, if "the f*ckers" ever sue...)
Then you can start considering within those restrictions what other things you should and can limit to safeguard security.
Then LASTLY you ask the question of whether there are any other things you can or need to restrict. Odds are the limitations to get reasonable retention times and security restrictions will have cut your storage needs significantly already (unless you're in finance or other heavily regulated business and is required by law to archive significant amounts of your communications)
email is a basic tool like the phone - it should just work.
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....
Email is the most important form of communication for many businesses.
Sometimes people need to find an old agreement of some sort and the benefit of finding this information can be worth a lot of money.
So, take a deep breath and solve the problem. Regular archiving of old Emails is fine, as well as limiting the size of individual Emails, as well as banning personal Emails. Make users jump through any hoops you like. But don't make them delete their old business Emails.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Enterprise Vault.
The thing I like most about this job is all the rocket scientists who bang their mice on their desks shouting 'It Broke!
Only use tape for the recent stuff. Extract the bulk of the data over time to a replicated spinning disk archive using a product like Legato's EmailXtender. That way your backup/restore scenario is simple, and you have unlimited mailbox sizes.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Limit message size and implement some kind of shared network storage (where people can put files) and/or some kind of internal corporate IM system (I know such things exist) with file transfer functionality.
Shift Delete does the delete in one operation. Delete, review and Delete is for the indecisive.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
~400 users or so
Exchange
200MB/person (higher amounts for execs)
The mailbox size is way too small because of the kinds of business we do, VM sent to your email etc.
Among other lame-o things, it blocks powerball.com (labelled "gambling," which I guess is considered "bad" -- I always thought of it as an "investment" site...).
When my office-mates and I enter a PowerBall pool when the jackpot exceeds $200M, how am I supposed to check whether I need to quit my job?
So your company of 300 people use $150 worth of HD space? OH GOD NOOOOO!!! I hate sys admins who limit email accounts to less than the free gmail, yahoo, etc...
At work we are all limited to 150MB. Even the upper-lever managers only get 150MB and all they do is email. It's retarded. You may hate IMAP, but we (the users, and your customers) love it. Learn that and you will keep your job. Ignore the users and sys admins will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I was exchange admin few years back. We had approx. 250-300 users. Problem with corporate email is the large amount of redundant files. (30 people with the same pps) Stress use of network storage for such items. Also remove attachments from email, but keep the message. That helps as well. We didn't have a real strict limit, but went after people over 1GB. 13 is obsurd. Force people to comply by limiting access when they hit a predetermined limit. If you aren't VERY strict when first deployed, they will walk all over an exchange admin.. Remember, their emails are far more important than anyone elses!
The company I work for is a not-for-profit organization that has over a thousand employees spread around a handful of offices with an Exchange server for email. Users have a 120meg limit by default. Some, like graphic designers, need more and are given it but for the majority of users, a personal Outlook file is kept on one of the local office servers and users are instructed on how to drag and drop batches of files from the exchange folders to the personal folders stored on the local server. These folders obviously aren't available to them via Outlook Web Access but I actually get extremely few complaints about the setup. A full server restore takes about 5.5 hours I believe.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
We added the Outlook interface to our Document Management System (Interwoven Website) which allowed users to drag and drop emails and attachments from the Exchange Information Store into the DMS just as though they were moving it to a regular Exchange subfolder.
The nice thing about this was the DMS kept the email metadata (sent time, received time, recipients, etc) and our Exchange store became manageable. Restoring an email and/or its attachments to the DMS was trivial compared to getting something back into Exchange.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
The company that i work for also has similar email policies. That is to say, they have none. we have one office with about 400+ users spread over two exchange server 5 mail databases on each server. Total size of DBs....350+ Gigs... And there are no plans in sight to try to alleviate the load.
I feel your pain!!!
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Not only are policy updates sent via email, but almost everything else. I have a 4GB mbox for Thunderbird at work, holding emails from as far back as 2000. The thing is, those emails have to be searchable. A searchable archive separate from the active Inbox or Local Folders mboxen would be very handy.
This macro will remove attachments from the current selection of mail items in Outlook. Pretty handy ...
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
It isn't speed or really cost, it is durability. I don't trust SATA for 24x7 heavy usage (or 14x6, which is more reasonable. I've had issues with the drives not living very long when running them like that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
EmailXtender - gives your users virtually unlimited storage while still keeping your exchange databases smallx tender.htm
http://www.legato.com/products/emailxtender/email
Backups run faster.
Restores run faster.
Users largely won't notice a difference - other than faster mailbox access and when archived content is accessed, it takes a few seconds to retrieve the content back into the live database.
You could still probably run 4 active in a raid-5 with a hot spare 5th drive cheaper with more storage than a scsi solution. If the server goes down of course you need at least a cold server you can bring up relatively quickly.
I don't think that works on the web client, which is what I use a good bit of the time.
Plus, it is silly to have to do some silly key combo to delete email.
Create a file share with a folder for each user only writable by them and accessible through a web server by everyone. Encourage users to put documents that they would share with others in that folder. They can then browse it with their web browser and copy and paste a link to someone. This has the added benefit of being able to update the document and since everyone just has the link, they see the current version whenever they open the document.
...and the added benefit of creating a single-tiered permissions scheme, where every inside user has access to any document available to any other user through this method.
BBzzzzzzzzttt. Back to your parent's basement. Get a job in a decent sized IT department. Learn something. Come back when what you posted above embarasses you.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I'd recommend one change immediately: force the policy to purge Deleted Items after x months. No one ever empties their Deleted Items. Ever.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
$2500 won't buy you CRAP for serious server storage. I spent $5,100 just on drives and only got 720GB of RAID5 15K RPM storage, this doesn't include the server or RAID controller. To support a much larger server you are looking at 10's of thousands.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I work at a law firm that has roughly 250 users. Users are restricted to 75MB for their Exchange storage. Once they hit 75MB, they start receiving messages stating that they have gone over their storage limit and they need to clean out their inbox before their account is locked down. At 80MB, their account is restricted from sending outgoing email.
I know this sounds very strict, but unless you have a policy that the powers that be are aware of and support, you will be storing everyone's favorite Will Farrell clips. Nothing against a little more cowbell, but this does not help your business work efficiently. The Executive committee is aware of and in support of this policy. I believe that much of this had to do with my previous boss telling them, "you want better performance, spend more money". Attorneys are notoriously cheap. That is also why we have a staff of four. Ugh.
We try to train people how to keep their inbox clean, how to actually empty their deleted items folder, and how to check and clean out their sent items. Those who complain too much, we direct to one of the executive partners so they can really address the issue with someone with some power. Most are too cowardly to take it any further.
I do however wish we had a better solution to having people create and backup to a PST file. The problem with backing up to a PST is that if they do not put their PST on a network share such as a redirected home directory, eventually someone's computer will blow up with a huge important PST on their local hard drive. While we are not held accountable for anything they save to their local computer, it's never any fun explaining to someone they are SOL when it comes to recovering that PST. Also, Microsoft does not recommend or support using PST files located on a network share. They become prone to corruption. I also suspect that the use of so many PST files over our network is degrading the overall performance of things. Please note that I have only recently started to consider this idea and have yet to do the research to support it, so do not take this as fully educated information. It is just a hunch right now.
I really do feel for you though. Best of luck working things out.
You're still not getting it, I'm afraid. IT professionals prefer for the place the data lives not to break in the first place. That's why we use SCSI, not SATA or IDE.
We use SCSI, and RAID-5 it with a hot spare, and have a cold server on standby. That solution:
a) breaks less than your does
b) when it breaks is just as recoverable as yours is.
so it wins.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We have Exchange 2003, 150 Users, and we are an apparel manufacturer.
I get a complaint nearly everyday about mailbox limits, and it's well worth it.
I decided what our limit should be: 100mb. Small? Yes. The server performs damn well, since I set it up over a year ago not one person has complained about speed.
Everything else goes into the users personal folders. If their computer goes, so does that. The execs all have laptops, which are backed up to an Altiris Recovery server. If their laptop goes, they don't lose anything.
The odds against 2 drives in a SATA RAID-5 array breaking before you can get one replaced is highly unlikely. It is more than redunant enough for 50 user exchange.
Yeah, I'm low on the pole in a 3000 user environment, and we're capped at 40mb/account before you start getting nastygrams, and 50 before you're MIA. Clean-DeletedItems-On-Exit is forced on by our login script, and no-one gets extra space, period. .PST files for most users, stored on a network share... so instead of a nice big Exchange box to manage and back up, we have hundreds of PST files in constant use, corrupting, chewing up bandwidth, and ending up costing more server space than increased Exchange boxes would.
Of course, because of this, we've been forced to set up
Of course, when you don't have to write the rules, it's easy to complain, but I'm sure there's a logical reason they've capped it so small. I'm sure as soon as they solve that pesky Y2K problem and update their flannel wardrobe, they'll give us something a bit more in tune with todays disk capacities.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Spinning mechanical devices with motor actuated heads is going to fail. It maybe tomorrow, it may be 3 years from now, but it will fail. SCSI, SATA, or UATA. So "not to break in the first place" is just not true. Reliability has nothing to do with the drive interface anyways - it's just that "enterprise" class drives are typically only available with FC or SCSI interfaces. That is not necessarily the case today.
Further, looking at the reliability of a single drive w/o context is meaningless and old school thinking too. You have to consider heat, vibration, the # of spindles necessary to store the required data set size while maintaining protection from single drive failure. Modern ATA RAID setups with 3 x 500GB server class drives to store 1TB of data is going to be more reliable in many use cases than 5 x 300GB SCSI drives. Remember, each additional spindle decreases your overall reliability. So comparing a single drive to another single drive is meaningless by itself. Plus, the cost of the drives alone is 4x more for the SCSI setup.
Besides, old school IT professionals use parallel SCSI. Anything actually critical has been Fibre Channel for some time now - going to fully clustered or at least zone mapping failover to secondary server. In either case, parallel SCSI is, well, ancient. If you truly care about performance and/or resiliency, it's all FC. Otherwise, you don't and SATA or UATA is probably good enough with enough care in design.
Running sendmail/squirrelmail/mailman/spamassassin/clamav/ dovecot.
About 150 users right now, with more in the future - they're migrating from a truly hideous reseller-provided email service. The plan is to have a 2 GB limit, and have the spam folder auto-purge anything over 30 days. We do need the larger space - it's a radio station, so there needs to be room for audio files to be sent about. We will have an FTP upload site for the larger files, but e-mail is easier for a <50 MB file...
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
It's not like 300GB disks are expensive. Buy a few of them, put them in a raid. Don't back up to tape but make incremental backups to a separate disk array. Problem solved, hw cost a few thousand $ at most.
And remember, you're there to support your users, not the other way around. It's not up to you to determine what's important or not. If the guy says his four year mail is important, it is and it's your job to ensure it is accessible and securely backed up every night.
Jilles
10MB - Maximum per-message limit
40MB - Daily nastygram from the mailserver.
50MB - User can no longer send, but can recieve.
200MB - User can no longer send or recieve mail.
This works well with several thousand users. Exceptions are only made where there is a true regulatory requirement or buisness critical need.
By first disabling the user's ability to send messages, it provides an incentive to correct the problem before messages start bouncing back, keeping the worst offenders in line without giving them a chance to complain about missing emails.
My guess is that there will be a lot of duplication of large files, between people and also within a single user's mail box. One way to get around this would be to strictly impose a mail box limit, then provide a common, structured file system to which people can save documents and email links around instead of the files themselves. Open a section of this file system on a secured extranet site in case outsiders need access.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Employee Productivity Matters far more than IT Staff Productivity. Being able to dredge up material from the last couple of years and look up meeting notes from meetings 3 years ago is sometimes really valuable. Wasting my time (as a non-IT worker) trying to use Microsoft products in a vaguely IT-department-efficient way is not productive (as well as being a lost cause.)
My company resolves the problem by having employees keep their mailboxes on their PCs, which most of us need to do anyway because we're using laptops out in the field. Anything that fits on my disk drive is my problem, and about 2-3 years ago, laptop disk drives hit the part of the Moore's Law curve where they're simply Big Enough. We also get about 35MB/employee of online quota, which is a useful buffer for a week of laptop repair time. (They actually allow a lot more than that, because blocking non-spam email is a really bad idea, but you can't send email if you're above the quota, so you're pretty much forced to clean it up as soon as you can.)
Outlook tends to self-destruct when your .pst mailfile reaches somewhere between 1.5 and 2GB, so it's important to keep file sizes below that - I used to try to keep them down to 700MB so I could burn backup CDs, but now I've got an external USB2 disk and a DVD burner so I don't have those problems.
I still try to keep the file down to the 1GB range because otherwise searching tends to be too slow.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So for in-house use, run a file server with Samba or some Microsoftish protocol that employees can mount on their machines - you can walk out of Fry's with a 1TB server for around $700, and you can waste a lot more employee time by not doing it :-) To deal with the external world, you'll probably want an FTP (actually one of the SSH variants) or web server - there are various tools that let people drag&drop files using http to store things.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd try to educate your users to unload much of the redundant email and discussion therein onto a wiki. There are great, scalable, and easy to install wikis available (MediaWiki, TWiki, SnipSnap); in fact, I'd bet some of your guys probably have a wiki running somewhere on box under their desk...
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't RAID6 or RAID10, is nucking futs.
At Boeing, I had around 15mb for my exchange account. It seemed to fill up quite often due to all of the internal email and I had to constantly clean things up. However I guess that is to be expected with around 200,000 worldwide email accounts in the system.
The email that takes the most disc space are those with attachments associated with them. A document (spreadsheet, word doc, pdf, images etc) that is sent to 20 people takes up 20x the disc space. If someone makes a change to the document and then sends it around again the disc usage is doubled. These documents should belong in a document mangemenet system that can track changes and handle the work flow. This need to be done with the education of the users - where this has been introduced I have seen this break down as the documents also get emailed around.
The solution ? A document management system that works well with email. Documents need to appear in peoples inbox and be forwarded around using traditional email techniques but underneath the conventional mailbox file systems are replaced with a database.
I saw a solution for improving the efficiency of e-mail usage in large organization like yours. It's name is MailShrink, and it is implemented for Exchange. www.corposoft.com
I won't mention the name but our companies policy is pretty straightforward - anything older than 90 days is PURGED. Yup, if it's not within that window it's deleted. Period. Stop. End of story.
:-) Putting two and two together it appears that we may be doing this to try and prevent our e-mail from becoming a liability in case of a law suit. Yes, it sucks for the employees but from a CYA point of view it's probably not a bad idea.
We're told it's for storage reasons which I only half believe. I say this because the policy was instituted RIGHT after one of these companies out there got it's ass nailed to the wall after a court order to cough up emails.
I would be willing to bet that if someone has over a Gig of email or more that chances are there are things in that mail box that probably shouldn't see the light of day! Now, doing this has no doubt lead to people saving things locally and has certainly led to some things getting lost during the purge (they warn us monthly before they purge). The local stuff, unless on a shared drive, is stored on laptops which so far as I know aren't backed up. Duh, this is a potential problem and these are also machines that get taken around so loss is also an issue.
Overall though it seems to work to help keep sizes down on a pretty big infrastructure. It also means that if someone comes calling with paper we may have some defense to say that gosh darn it we purged the requested data. Now there may be backups, I'm sure something is kept, but if they are smart there rotation period is such that the data isn't held for too long. So far as I know, since we're not a stock trading firm or anything, there's no law that says we have to keep data for an extended period of time. Hopefully this will help us keep from falling on our sword should something stupid happen. Certainly the most draconian policy I've ever seen though!
BTW - got one of those HotMail upgrades to beta test along with it's attendant space increase. It sucked so bad to use and didn't support FireFox so I ended up opting out and going back to the smaller storage! Geez it sucked having to read everything in one window alal Gmail - I like to drag\drop in two windows to read WEB mail...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I work for a major British department store. Head Office staff have limits of 200 meg, Store Managers have 200 meg as well, Sales Managers get 20 meg. The store staff tend to use email as storage, so we get a lot of people ringing up asking for more space. The answer is always no and a quick lesson in buying a usb memory stick. Even with the limits in place, we're still gagging for more exchange servers. If you ask me, a main store email address and one for the Store Manager is enough. 120 odd stores, with one store manager, one store email account, one foodservices account and 10-15 'personal' accounts is more than too much, in my opinion!
Ironically, tar is exactly what you should use for the backups. You are apparently ignorant or incompetent.
Email Platform: Exchange/Outlook
Type of Business: Government
Number of Users: Unknown
Our current mailbox limits are:
40MB - issue a warning
45MB - stop user from sending
50MB - stop user from sending and receiving
Yes, that's MEGA-BYTES. We also have limited options for PST files; as the users' personal drive is limited to 250MB. We have no "recommended best procedure" for storing email; we encourage clients to delete what they don't need.
echo $wittysigline;
Attachments are an egregiously inefficient way to move and store binary data. There are two big reasons why they have become such a problem.
1) First, when MS ran the illegal smear campaign against Novell, MS Windows gained some market share in the server room (which has slowly been eroding). The effect of that was that in practice networked storage went away. The need for it did not.
2) Thus the second factor. The need for networked storage being as strong as or stronger than ever, but no means of carrying it out any more, users resort to work-arounds such as using sneakernet and / or e-mail attachments.
MS encouraged the latter by setting up Outlook and Outlook express to facillitate the sending of attachments. First, it mailbombs people not on the same MS Exchange server, second it is usually used as a vector to spread MS proprietary data formats which in turn drives sales.
I'm not saying they have the skill and forethough to intentionally plan all that. I'm saying that's how it rolled out. It works the same way with housemates, if you're a big enough slob and your housemates can't straighten you out or evict you, then all the clean people leave and everyone else just live in a place like a sty. Just as it's very hard to turn around a pig style of a house, it's very hard to clean up a corporate computing environment once MS products have started to metastasize.
Most people will stop mis-using their e-mail if they have networked storage available, but it does mean that their IT shop has to set it up for them and will only work if it's a non-MS arrangement (e.g. Netware, Samba, AFS, etc.)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
In my own personal experience, and in the comments so far here, there is a real opportunity for a good, easy to implement, and inexpensive email solution.
Yeah, there's lotus notes, exchange servers, "give them all a gmail account for personal email" "send the link, not the file" etc.
All good options, but more of a workaround IMO. Exchange Server Email IS a lot like a file system to the user, in a way - you have public folders, private folders, a "tree" view. So we are ALL inclined to store vast quantities of information on there.
I think there would be room for a good corporate solution from a new, startup dotcom that provides a solid IT-friendly email management infrastructure that lets users do what they WANT to do. Share vast quantities of information in a messaging based way. Scalable. FAST. Easy to backup. Easily searchable
Think outside the box, guys. There is no reason that email has to be like it used to be, because it isn't.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Have you considered another approach? Software such as Symantec Enterprise Vault (http://www.veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&ref Id=322) specialises in archiving email from exchange. It removes old or rarely used emails from Exchange and archives them to some NAS or other backup locations. In place of the messages it leaves shortcuts. With the help of a client a plug-in, the end user is none-the-wiser and thinks that all their emails are in their mailbox. You can access archived messages just as you would normal ones, but with a slightly longer delay.
.PST files, but then you're left with the problem of archiving those too, plus they aren't terribly accessible. At least with something like Enterprise Vault you can make it appear that all the messages are still on the server and manage the archiving at the server directly, giving you control over how much actual running capacity the mailboxes require.
Sure, this is probably a shameless plug, and yes, I did work on this software back in the days before Veritas ate KVS Ltd and Veritas merged with Symantec merged. However, there are other similar products about and I think this is an approach worth considering, be it with this particular product or not.
Most companies have users with bloated mailboxes and we found that many of our clients *couldn't* delete old messages for legal reasons. Normally, users are forced to archive messages to
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
We do not have any restrictions, let alone ones that are automatically enforced. Instead we work with people who are reasonable and responsible. If there seems to be a problem we discuss it. People understand and act accordingly. Did you talk to these people and find out *why* they need to use that much space? Or *why* they cannot archive/delete things after you alerted them to the problem?
http://www.veritas.com/kvs/
i am an admin for 200+ users and i am convinced that there is no answer to this question. i have seen a 2 gig email sent, 200 meg attechments sent to 50+ users and the exchange server used as a file server. i do understand that the data is important (even more important than me) and i have a job because of this data. i want to help my users but som of them are just to stupid or obstanant. we have made an ftp site, gave instruction on how to use it how to insert links in emails... nothing changes. if we did not impose limits we would have users with 30 gigs on exchange.
This is exactly what we had once. They wanted to move from file servers to Exchange. :o
"Well, we want to move away from file servers and store our data in Exchange."
"You're serious?"
"Oh yes. You can store your personal data in Personal Folders and we'll keep shared data in Public Folders."
"Uh...you're serious?"
"Oh yes!"
"Okay..."
This was crazy to me. I know isinteg must have become their friend.
Manufacturing Company
Exchange Server 2003
300 Users
60MB Mailbox size limit (some fudging allowed for execs)
90 day email retention (no fudging allowed, period)
No archiving allowed
MailMarshall Server for Spam control
Total size of public and private message stores: 13GB
There are ways of dealing with this sort of things.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I love Picasa. Makes searching for archived pictures a joy.
I have my own company, and work as a System Administrator (Unix, AIX, Hp-UX, Linux, and OpenVMS) as well. The last job I worked (for 8 years) we used a 30 day limit. Older mail was to be archived either to your local drive or to your network account. The limit on the network account was the limit on network storage space allocated per user. Important information could be moved into department or company storage. Department storage was up to the department manager to manage; all contents were subject to his/her review. Company storage was subject to review and consideration by all department managers. As you can guess, private traffic, images, music files, and other questionable material became somewhat self-managed quickly. When we moved from an uncontrolled situation to this policy we planned to keep 180 days of e-mail backups. No matter how well you publish your intent and justifications, someone will discover that they have let something critical be deleted soon. You KNOW who they will blame if it cannot be retrieved!
Light, Love, Happiness,
The macro I've wanted for years, as an end user, is one that kicks in when I detach a file. All it would do is leave a link telling me where I put the file. Of course I might delete or move the file afterward, but this alone would help keep my .pst file down to size, and has the added benefit that I don't lose so much if the .pst gets corrupted.
Unreadable blocks shouldn't get discovered for the first time during a rebuild. The drive's SMART surface scan or the controller's periodic surface scan is supposed to find them first. If you're using drives without block relocation and a controller that doesn't do a periodic surface scan and block device level relocation, you're in for a world of hurt.
I'm sysadmin for a mid-sized company, which runs itself like a madhouse startup. One of the owners has been pummeled correctly into using our centralized file storage, and does so with glee. His .pst is still over 7GB. He attaches small pictures occasionally, but he never deletes anything, and writes nearly 300 emails a day. The man is a communications junkie, our asses were literally saved when MS lifted the 2GB cap on Office XP's .pst file, it was weekly triage to keep his e-mailer afloat. Some folks are just mad apples about their e-mail.. go figure!
I'm not sure how much storage we have dedicated to email (we use Exchange/Outlook), but my building has 1500+ users. We have a standard quota of about 70MB of server space allocated to each user. Past that, they are expected to archive on THEIR OWN MACHINE. When they approach the server quota limit, they are sent a warning message. When they exceed the limit their mailbox is locked until it is cleaned out by the user.
Obviously, some users have bigger accounts, but it's not the majority by any means.
By doing this, it eases the stress on our network and storage limitations. 1500 people want a lot of storage, and the government just doesn't provide the money. We also roll out Outlook with "Auto Archive" enabled to help out with all this.
I work at a large corporation (80k employees). They limit us to 50MB on the exchange server. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass because it forces you to copy locally all the time, but there's no trouble with server support. Backups are left to the user to figure out.
Today, if a user tries to attach a file greater than 20 MB, the user gets a refusal message. This did cause a few help desk calls - it took a little bit of working with a few users to train them to use FTP.
But, this one little change greatly changed the growth curve in our email storage requirements.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
If you do research on Exchange performance, you will quickly realize that the number of spindles has a marked affect on the amount performance your raid set can provide. SATA has only been out for a year or so? I am not going to switch to SATA raid sets for high performance / highly available servers to save a few bucks....not until someone else does and has good results. About a year ago, we compared performance numbers of a RAID of ATA storage vs RAID of FC storage and the performance curve as a function of the number of users for RAID of ATA storage was dramatically lower.
Wow, no mail box limits? Really? Sounds really expensive.
I work for the large telco in the US where we get about 20-50 business related messages each a day, if it's a quiet day and there's no crisis in progess. Even here, we have pretty draconian limits in place. We use Micro$oft LookOut! Exceed your limits and you get a message from "System Attendant" saying that your "n" oldest messages have been moved to System Cleanup folder, where your folder hierarchy is duplicated (Inbox, Sent Items, etc). Anything that spends more than a few days in System Cleanup just disappears.
If you want to archive anything, you have to create personal folders on your personal network drive.
Anyone that runs a large organization really has to have size limits and rules in place from the start, along with aggressive education on creating personal folders and automated rules for sort mail based on content and age. LookOut! is pretty menu-driven about buiding mail sorting rules so even mundanes can do it with a little training, and they should!
Whatever you do, don't do what my IT dept did...they had used a 100MB quota on mail for years, but made many exceptions. One day, without notice, they got rid of the exceptions. Outlook on the web didn't give me any warning that I saw, but I could not send or receive eMail.
I sent in an eMail saying that I would be out sick (I'm a college professor - if I blow off a few classes, people notice) and Outlook said it sent...it didn't. So, I get this call at 8:30am asking where I am. After trying to get the moron (my boss) to check her eMail for 10 minutes, I crawl out of bed and take a closer look at my eMail system.
4 hours later, the eMail started working again. All the assignments my students tried to hand in for 48 hours were permanently lost.
The morals of this story are:
(1) Give a BIG WARNING if the account is near or over it's limit.
(2) Give a constant status bar showing how close every user is to his/her limit. I should not have had to call IT to find out what my quota was.
(3) Never use Outlook.
Andy Out!
We have a limit of 5gb of storage on the server in the mailbox. We use Exchange 2003, but we have no limit on their personal storage. We map their My Documents location to a server so if the machine goes down, they can log into any other machine on campus and there is their documents. We really encourage the use of Personal Folders, but most don't so the size taken up from .pst files is minimal. I personally have kept every e-mail from my hire date (almost a year now). They all reside in my .pst file and its only about 150mb. If teachers fail to delete mail and the mailbox gets too full, they quit getting e-mail until they clear up space which usually we get a tech request asking us why their e-mail doesn't work. We just go in and delete a bunch of old e-mails and that works. Most of it is crap e-mails that have pictures in it that their friends sent them of their vacation. I would love to have the e-mail restricted to intra-district mailing only, but that would cause a revolution with these teachers.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
In order to comply with 17a-4 regulations, my company purchased EmailXtender from Legato(EMC). 55 users have generated over 45G of e-mail over the course of 7-8 years with abusers hitting 2-3G personal limits. Then they complained about not being able to synchronize offline folders. Duh! EX connects with your Exchange environment (5.5-2003) and will "shortcut" e-mail based on a rule set you create. Mail older than X days will be moved to the EX server and a 0K shortcut placed on the Exchange server. Made our Store drop from 40+G to about 7G. You need a hefty storage environment to keep the old mail separate, but EX can handle that using SQL, and it makes Exchange much more efficient.
We limit to 100MB, delete any object older than 60 days, and we do not backup pst files. We have about the same amount of users ~350. Our exchage server used to be 80GB, now it's at a cool 6GB. It took a while to get the users to deal with it, in fact I'm a huge email pack rack. My personal pst is hovering right underneath 1GB. But there is no reason to keep that crap on the exchange server.
"When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you." --leonstryker
...you muct be on crack. You can't stop the MACHINE to do training. No one has time. YOU make it happen. Heybiff
Even the Sun goes down.
I'm not in IT here (sorry), so I can't speak to the costs or backend ease of use, but as a frontend user, it is extremely seamless. Emails are moved to a "vault" (presumably some sort of compressed storage) according to rules (x days old, etc.), processed in the background. Full text searching still works, and the email still "appears" in Outlook (i.e., you can see to, from, subject, etc.). Opening an email takes a second or two to uncompress. Our IT has set no limit on the amount of email that can be archived into this system, and unless you're getting a LOT of huge emails, it is now very difficult to hit 2GB, because everything gets archived to the vault before you do.
We use Lotus Notes, mostly for the database aspect.
Users are limited to:
100 MB - Joe User
250 MB - IT and managers
500 MB - Big Wigs
Attachments over 5 mb inside the network are put on low priority while over 5 MB outside doesn't go at all. Some of us are pretty anal about watching sizes, if i'm bored one day i'll go through the files and email the offending users to archive or delete what they can.
We're a Canadian oilfield company and are required to keep everything for 7 years, emails, docs, financials, everything.
IANALOOA
Lets face it, every company I've worked for people try and use their email to store their attachments that they "need to keep". Problem is that they've replied to this email several times over which duplicates that attachment several times. Take a 10MB attachment for example, if a manager sends it out to 10 people requesting feed back, and they all respond to him, and then he turns around thanking them, all the while keeping the attachment that's almost .5 GB in just one thread! OUCH!
Simply increasing your storage space isn't going to resolve your problem either. People will just continue to expand their mail files until you run out of space.
We use Lotus Notes at my company, for most user's in North America we impose a 650MB limit. VIPs and Executives can get that raised to 850MB, or 1GB if they really need it (VARY RARE!). If the user goes over quota they are prevented from creating new mail messages until they get their size down (either through archiving or deleting unwanted messages).
We've also implemented a system that flushes messages out of a user's mail file that's older than 90 days, it warns them well before this time period that a message is in danger of being removed, and they are encouraged to archive any important emails before this happens.
Archives are stored on their local machines and are not backed up by us, the user is responcible for backing them up.
I work for an organization that has > 10,000 Exchange mailboxes. How many more than 10,000 I'm not sure, a quick search would limit me to 10,000 results, I suspect the actual total to be about 15k. We have our mailbox default set to 100mb before we start issuing warnings, and at 150mb we prohibit the user from sending. At no time do we prevent users from receiving. If somebody was to hit their limit, policy is to increase their mailbox size by 10%, up to a maximum of 300mb. 300mb is the policy-limited maximum size, however the decision was made recently to eliminate the usage of PST files nationally, by importing them into the user's mailbox, in an effort to improve how we manage e-mail. The PST migration has resulted in some mailboxes being in excess of 1gb, throwing the previously mentioned 300mb limit out the window. I don't know how the company that the OP works for is laid out, but my organization consists of several regions, each containg over a dozen sites, with staff often moving from one site to another. When they move sites, we transfer the user's personal share to the new site's local server, and this becomes a bit time consuming when moving large PSTs. E-mail is managed nationally, so it made sense to keep all the data in one place, limiting the amount of data that needs to be moved when somebody goes to a new site. These large mailboxes typically aren't a result of abuse, the biggest ones normally belong to senior managers, who never delete e-mail and often have several years worth of archives.
That means you need some kind of document management/collaboration solution.
f o/default.mspx plus our own (closed source) sollution built on top of it http://www.urudata.com/intellikon/esp/index.aspx (and it catalogues and archives emails)
The company I work for uses SharePoint Portal Server
http://www.microsoft.com/office/sharepoint/prodin
But there are several open source possibilities too, see http://www.opensourcecms.com/
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
My time is too $%$#@ valuable to waste going through and deleting old messages from my mailbox. Google Desktop allows me to find what I need, and email is my work and activity database.
The mail system should eat whatever I decide to store in it. IT doesn't have to like it, but when I waste a day/month cleaning out my inbox so save DASD rather than making my company better at our mission, and making money for our stockholders, it's a BIG waste for the organization.
IT is not the center of the universe. IT is there to facilitate people making the company money! DASD is cheap, my time is expensive. Opportunity cost is far more expensive.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
W2K3Esp1 on W2K3 servers, clustered two nodes.
educational institute, probably 800 mail boxes, 500gb stoage(mail and file), not scratching the surface...
Faculty: the warning comes at 100mb that is all we do for them. It really scares them, they clean up, and it's only a warning! For what we call sophisticated users (read: counselors, admin, business office), we bump the quota on an as needed basis.
Students: Warning at 40mb, cut off send at 50mb, can recieve at all times.
IT Department: No quota! it's good to be the KING.
We periodically check users mail box size, we like a good laugh once in a while! So that is our management tool-HUMOR!
HTH,
This is a good topic, I store tons of stuff in e-mail. Always accessible. Saved my ass on "personal assistance" calls more than once.... I guess, I could set up an ftp, but does every client you visit have an ftp client installed? and can they install one? permissions?
Sig Hansen?
Your example was for a 50 user mail server. That certainly doesn't require 8 drives. IT has a purpose of providing the most cost effective solution, not the solution that is slight better for a lot more money. If you were talking a high performance database server or application server than yeah use scsi but if your talking file servers or mail servers use SATA with a hot spare drive.
40MB limit in your account before you get a nastygram saying you're over the limit--which is sort of ironic since that e-mail contributes to your wicked ways. At 50MB you can't send anything until you clean things out and move them to a .pst file on your hard disk. (Big administrative no-no to put them on the network somewhere)
Then they limit single e-mail attachments received and sent to 10MB. Try and break that one and another automated nasty-gram.
This work for 99% of the users on the network.
Think of the back end and not the shiny icons (which represent mails stored on a central server by the way) - an open mailbox format, like everything other than exchange, makes it possible to do work outside of the mail server program and export mailboxes to where they are needed if employees are transferred to another site or software migration. Even a shared "attachments" directory outside of the mailboxes solves the problem - and I'm fairly sure you can even do that with recent versions of MS Exchange.
Putting all the mail on a central server IS a good idea so that you can more easily back up everyones mail - but it's of only limited usefulness if you can't do much with the backups. I've only run MS Exchange breifly to fill in for others (and only three servers and a temporary one to test the bare metal restore procedure) so others will know a lot more than me. The biggest worry was finding out the exchange "expert" who had come in to set up a new server had forgotten a critical patch and made it an open relay - so perhaps the systems I saw were badly misconfigured and that explained their fragility and poor performance.
This tends to be one of those situations where what "should happen" and what "does happen" do not intersect.
If you're using drives without block relocation and a controller that doesn't do a periodic surface scan and block device level relocation, you're in for a world of hurt.
SATA does not handle these functions as well as SCSI in the real world. Unfortunate, but true.
Outside of the financial services industries (which I work in) there aren't too many companies that have huge regulatory requirements applied to them for long-term document retention. (HIPPA, SOX, etc.)
However, many firms do have internal standards for document retention, for various business and legal reasons. It's very common to mandate that all email older than a given date be deleted, in accordance with a standardized policy. This policy is the big catch- it allows for the company to say to a potential litigator "Sorry, everything past XX date has been destroyed, according to our standard policy".
Deleting things to avoid the discovery process = bad. Deleting them constantly as part of a standard policy that allows you to avoid the discovery process = good.
There are some frustrating things that happen here, but the real intent is to delete those emails that shouldn't surface, and which might look really bad out of context in court. Or that secretary telling her boyfriend how her boss is cheating and stealing, whether it's true or not. all these things will be found during a long discovery process in a court case, and are better off being nuked if you can do so.
This is exactly why brokerage firms are required to keep all (and they mean ALL) customer correspondence for 7 years. We archive every fax, letter, check, email, instant message, and even post-it notes that come from customers/clients. that's a LOT of data, but it's the law.
Sarbanes-Oxley is making some changes in the way that public corporations are having to archive corporate email and messaging, but even in that case having an appropriate policy to destroy the documents after the retention period is a very wise one.
my 2 cents!
EOM
Pity those dvd's will only last about 5 years then.
I have maintained in outlook 'search' a folder that include a large mail folder search.
Everything over 100k, from ALL boxes goes here. Sent, Drafts, junk email..
I set the properties of the 'large mail' folder to be show TOTAL number of items, not UNREAD items.
and that # in bold is always nagging me, forcing me to prune it if I don't want to be annoyed.
this really keeps my OST file small....
I also have folders where advertising I may want goes
(dell discounts, geeks.com stuff, buy.com, amazon) and that folder is also set to show TOTAL number of items
I prune it a lot more often than when it's just greyed out... but I also ignore it when I'm too busy to look.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You're going to laugh, but I work at a large company that runs Microsoft Exchange and we have a 35MB limit on exchange accounts. The really ironic thing is, of course that leads multiple gigabyte pst files on the network, since people live out of their email and want it backed up.
Publishing documents interally isn't exactly unheard of. Most business documents aren't private.
Also, how is sending a link different from emailing the actual document? Anyone who receives an attachment can forward the document just as they could forward a link. The one thing it does enable is a password protected sharing site where, while everyone who has a link to a document can access it, they still need to log in and that access is logged.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
$2500 won't buy you CRAP for serious server storage.
l icWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=1764600
My array is decent. I wouldn't put this array production at a company for maintainability reasons (only I would know how to fix it if it broke) but the technology is sound and with some software work and support it would probably be appropriate for a corperate environment. I can read from the array at about 130 MB/s and write to it at about 100 MB/s locally and, because it's raid 6, it can sustain 2 drive failures without data loss. I'm sure the max I/O's per second will be less than half of what it could be with the same number of faster drives but it's hardly slow. The gigabit network and the network clients are the bottleneck in most cases.
If you want to see the hardware I used, here it is:
https://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/Pub
I use Linux's software raid. It took a little work outside of the normal Fedora setup to make it work the way I wanted it to but other than that it was pretty straightforward.
I spent $5,100 just on drives and only got 720GB of RAID5 15K RPM storage, this doesn't include the server or RAID controller.
There are very expensive drives out there and usually, buying them is a bad idea.
I'm sure those 15K RPM drives have faster transfer rates than the drives I used and can handle many more IOs per second, especially when pushed to high queue depths, but for an email server with the number of users mentioned I'd say 8-16 large 7200 RPM large SATA drives would work just fine. Most people make the mistake of assuming if they want a fast array they need fast drives. If you want an array to give quick responses under the load of a large number of simultanious users, more spindles does a lot more than faster drives.
The added benefit of using a large number of slower drives is huge capacity. This matches up well with storing large ammounts of email since most of the older email will be infrequently accessed.
To support a much larger server you are looking at 10's of thousands.
Generally cost per megabyte increases as the size of your array increases but if you design one well, tens of thousands (implying more than 20k) is spending too much. My array has 1.7TB usable. A more conventional setup involving a name brand server with a hardware raid controler would undoubtedly cost more but I suspect one could be found for far less than $20k.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Yes....there is a class of document that will work exactly as you say.
Now tell me how you address the other classes of documents.....with another system? And yes, I'm talking about the CFO sending the CEO the 10K before he files it. I'm talking about the office manager sending the payroll spreadsheet to the president so he can look at it first. I'm talking about the R&D group making the latest patent filing available to the rest of the R&D group without the entire company + contractors being able to see it.
Of course, any of this being a problem depends on whether you think security through obscurity is a valid be-all-end-all security mechanism.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
First of all, you oughta mandate a file attachment limitation or lifetime of large files. Like, "no files over 20 MB" and if you do allow it "files over 20 MB will stay on the server only 10 days" so detach it and save it elsewhere. Second, if users know that things are going to get tossed after a certain period of time, they tend to print or save important messages. Say, one year's worth.
Third, I would look at management levels. For example, the receptionist does not necessarily need to keep mail forever, while the in-house attorney may need to. You can set up recipient policies to automatically clean up mailboxes of certain groups. Believe it or not, while you may get resistance to clean up policies, most employees in certain workgroups are thankful of it in the long run. You also have the option to turn off cleanup in certain folders, so it it's important, the user only has to move it to a folder.
It's just flat dangerous to keep mail forever. E-mail's primary function is to send and receive in a timely manner, not store. If you have to keep mail forever, consider pricy archival solutions like Archiveone or Veritas Enterprise Vault. KEYWORD: solution. But you gotta think about policy for archiving to do any good!
Have you considered donating a small prize like a bottle of champagne to the user who cleans up the most email? It's quite effective when you throw competition into it.
The solution I suggest neither causes nor solves the problem you bring up.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Ummm....yeah.
I didn't say it caused it. But the scenario is REAL LIFE, so if you're "solution" doesn't address it (and my point was that is does not) it's not a valid solution for most businesses that would use somehting like this.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175903&t hreshold=0&commentsort=1&mode=thread&cid=14634253
Incorrect about identical radar and IR sigs... this I cannot elaborate on (I admit this is convienient but it is also true). Specifically, decoys are *balloons* for all intents and putposes. They have drastically different ballistic drag coefficients... whenever they encounter ANY atmopsheric drag at all their tragectory becomes obvious. The moment they reenter they basically are stripped away from the threat.
Additionally decoys are unguided. The will have an estimate impact over a point that is not worth defending. Also... they TUMBLE. Armed RV's don't. So ignore them.
Spend the money on a booster and RV that looks like a real RV... then you may as well put a warhed in it. Simple economics. If such an target is detected them it must be considered a threat.
BTW, I have only read The Hunt For Red October - liked it I will admit, and I work on the Navy's Aegis BMD program.
There is much unclassified suject matter on this available on the web if you look. Really, I told you to THINK before you answered.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"Incorrect about identical radar and IR sigs... this I cannot elaborate on (I admit this is convienient but it is also true)." - It is indeed VERY convenient especially given that information regarding Soviet plans for loading warhead buses with inert warheads is not exactly secret. This is also why the radar and IR signatures ARE identical. Perhaps you're confused about something a less technically competent country such as China or India would use, ergo your reference to 'balloons' and other stupid obfuscation plans.
"Spend the money on a booster and RV that looks like a real RV... then you may as well put a warhed in it. Simple economics. If such an target is detected them it must be considered a threat." - Ridiculous. Late Soviet SLBM missile technology programs, i.e. post SS-N-25 (cancelled by the way) systems, utilized refabricated fissile material taken from older class systems typically deployed on Delta class submarines. The Delta's were not disarmed, nor were they decommissioned, this led to a DOD report (which you may be able to find) speculating that the Soviet Union was retrofitting the buses with inert warheads. This very same DOD report speculated that several SLBM tests in the mid 90's were specifically for the purpose of evaluating the 'worthiness' of decoying given that the systems in question had been tested and approved previously and generated the identical telemetry to test observers.
"Additionally decoys are unguided" - Uh, you do realize that valid MIRVs are also unguided? LOL.
"Also... they TUMBLE" No, they don't, ignoring the fact that you earlier declared these items to be 'balloons', I wonder as to why you suddenly believe that balloons 'tumble'?
"and I work on the Navy's Aegis BMD program" - Interestingly enough, I spent 16 months writing code to simulate SLBMs for a not to be mentioned party; however, I can mention that this took place at the NASA Ames Research center in the late 90's. BTW, the Aegis BMD program is not intended to deal with ICBMs, ergo, perhaps you were referring to short or medium ranged ballistic threats, ergo the differences in what we're talking about.
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