Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
/
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. :
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.
And what's wrong with making your e-mail system do what the users want it to do? Why not tailor your e-mail system to your users' needs? Sure, it costs a bit more for a bigger mail server, but that's ok as long as that's what everyone wants.