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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."
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.
We have a similar problem... 100gigs of email for 30 people, (60 mailboxes) in Exchange. We work for the government doing different things, involving many, many pictures of real estate. Most of those come from sub contractors in email, and its just archived there in exchange.
I wish I could come up with a better way to store it, but everything I have tried makes our owner throw a fit, so it goes back to the only part of the computer she knows how to work... Her email.
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.
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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. :
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!
I don't have a problem believing that amount of emails. The consulting engineering company I worked for (14 people in all) had abut 80 GB of emails when I joined the company. Many of them were replicated across mailboxes, because mails sent to one guy might need to be forwarded for further evaluation by others (and they didn't know how to use the network server properly) and in one case I blinked several times and double checked to make sure, but someone had sent a 1.8 GB (yes, GIGAbyte) email(!!!).
It contained every single version of a set of documents involved in a project (I think some 1.000+ documents) nicely zipped in a single file. Not sure just how long it took to send or receive, but our mailserver was set up not to reject anything, except for a complete lack of diskspace.
It made me rethink the need for storage space in our company.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
What will you do when the auditor comes and wants all the emails you are legally obliged to keep ?
It's the company directors responsibilty that your users didn't add their emails to the archive, not the employees.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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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.
* Disclaimer: I work for Xemplify IT, we sell software in this area *
;)
In my experience, significant quantities of your mail will be made up by movies & pictures being mailed around - it's risky to remove this carte blanche because some can actually be business related.
The second worst abusers are marketing and accounting staff. Not so much the volume of mail but the large attachments they tend to exchange, like monthly reconciliation spreadsheets, printing proofs, etc. The good news is handling these guys is easy -- if you really want to reduce your storage requirements/restore times without trying to force people into deleting mail you *need* to look at compressing old attachments. Most people find on average across the entire company they'll pull back around 38% of what's sucked up by PST's.
There's loads of software out there to help you with this. Some support Exchange & PST's, some like ours focus solely on PST's. Prices vary wildly but the big players are us - PSTCompactor http://www.pstcompactor.com/, Sherpa Software (http://www.sherpasoftware.com/) and PSTCompact (http://www.pstcompact/)
Hope this helps and love to have you as a customer
I store emails in the trash folder just for the immense convenience. On pretty much every window of the average email interface, there is a dedicated button to move mails to this folder (typically the red X). Heck, in the main window you've even got a dedicated keyboard button to do it! Don't want to keep this one in your inbox, but might need it later? [Delete]
Can't really do that with the other folders so easily, now can you?
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."
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
For that matter, we've started using Subversion and TortoiseSVN for documents on the business side of our company. After all, many times the back and forth email can be better served by versioning.
That said, it's been a bit of a learning curve for them, and they already have suffered that for email, so it takes some time.
You're not going to get upper management's support for a policy like this.
Excutives can't access your network and its file transfer solution from their laptop on a plane. They expect and NEED all the files that are referred to in emails, to be IN the mailbox that they have synchronized to their laptop.
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.