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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
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.
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.
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Another lame blog
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.
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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. :
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?
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'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"
We have a limit of exactl
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
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
Gmail accounts are totally inappropriate for business use or even near business use.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
One day I was helping a secretary clean up her old email (before migrating her to Thunderbird actually) and went to empty her Trash folder. She went nuts and said, "Wait, there is stuff in there I want". Turns out she had hundreds of email messages in dozens of folders and sub folders in her Trash folder, neatly organizing a bunch of mail she wanted to keep. Apparently she had been filing things in her Trash folder for years.
I should remember this when I organize my paper files; I could just put them in folders and then put them in the little box next to my desk labelled "Trash" and they will magically get filed for me every evening.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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!
- AMW
In pretty much every company I ever worked for, this would be grounds for immediate dismissal. The last thing you want is to be responsible for a confidential email getting into the wrong hands.
What happens in the company stays in the company.
so.. you work at hotmail?
"Apparently she had been filing things in her Trash folder for years."
Not that unusual really. I file most memos from my boss in the trash. Doesn't everyone?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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
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
My other suggestion is to register everybody a Gmail account for personal use and then have a special talk with the biggest inbox abusers
Perhaps the "inappropriate" remark was based on the presumption that it's not a very good idea to allow your user base to access free mail services from inside your network, let alone encouraging them to do it. After all most businesses are a bit shy about having totally uncontrolled conduits for data flowing into and out of the network, no?
I could see simply helping your user base out with a suggestion for a personal gmail account as long as it was qualified with "but don't expect to be able to access it while your on the company network"......;)
Actually, in Exchange, replies and CCs don't matter much. If you have forty people with the same 100mb attachment, it takes up only 100mb in the store, plus forty pointers. (tiny). And if 35 of those people 'delete' their attachment, the 100mb will still be used; your database size will barely shrink. Only if all references to an object are deleted will the space be auto-reclaimed. You can run into a problem when it's forwarded out of the company and then forwarded back IN, but as long as it stays within Exchange, it's just a bunch of pointers, not a bunch of 100mb attachments.
:) Once upon a time, I liked having people be able to email everything... but files have gotten so huge, and storage and backup for a big Exchange server is so obscenely expensive, that I regretfully discourage it now.
Limiting attachment sizes seems to curb the worst of the problems... but a lot of non-technical people will scream and kick about having to upload files to a server. When you explain to them that email storage is extremely, extremely expensive (because it has to be hyper-reliable), and website storage can be very cheap, they're often more accommodating. And you can usually automate it fairly well with a good client, like VanDyke's stuff.
I usually offer to set up a cron job to wipe a web transfer directory every day... this means the user doesn't need to remove the files they've uploaded. (so they don't give today's files to tomorrow's recipient by accident.) Some people like that: some people don't. Some want both a temporary and a permanent site, which is easy to set up.
Routine external-user password changes are a very good idea in this kind of setup. Fortunately, it's easy to script. It can run with the file-wipe.... autogenerate a new http auth password for the day and email it to the user. If there were no files to wipe, don't make a new password.
Whatever they like is cool with me, as long as they don't use Exchange for file storage.
It is true SIS only saves spaces inside a single storage group, but the rules for what replicates a new copy is a bit more complex. Taking a message with an attachment and forwarding it on to more users in the same storage group does not create another copy of the attachment in the store. If you saved the attachment to your local drive and then reattached it to a new email, it would create a new copy of the attachment in the database.
For the non-Exchange tech speakers, SIS stands for Single Instance Storage and applies to messages and attachments in Exchange. Exchange tries to be smart about storing messages and attachments by storing only a single copy of an email no matter how many people it is sent to. All the messages or attachments are really just references back to the original message/attachment. As stated above, it breaks down across storage groups, but does save quite a bit of space in each storage group.
My other suggestion is to register everybody a Gmail account for personal use
You may also find that some companies block access to external email sites like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc... My employer found that most of the infections on the network were related to content from outside email services so their solution was to keep people from accessing them. People could forward messages from home if needed and the messages would still go through the regular virus scans/checks/etc.... While the policy can be pretty annoying at times, people have adjusted to the policy.
As for email limits, I believe ours is set around 43MB on the Exchange server. We do have local files (stored on a network drive) that are not subject to the size rule on the email server, but are addressed by a corporate policy (which I would guess most people likely break). We also have a retention policy of 90 days for messages unless a user moves it to their personal files (.pst).
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;
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
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.
Low Email storage limits are another reason why IT's reputation continues to worsen. If an internet company can offer 2GB+ of email storage to millions of users for FREE, then why can my large company offer more than 100MB of email storage to five thousand professional staff?
Um, you can leave them in your inbox without pressing a key at all.
Ye gads, I just realized that I'm in the Exchange Tech Speaker group. Not exactly my finest hour, but I digress. (Do I get some sort of a fan club membership or something? Maybe an anti-penguin jacket or cap?)
I do think you'll find that exchange uses SIS to limit the number of replications of a particular message, not it's attachemnts. Changing this would be a welcome change, but for now forwarding = new message = replication.
As stated, SIS does limit this to 1 instance per message per storage group, but most large sites have tons of storage groups with users almost randomly peppered across them. Your chances of finding a large group you mail in one of these environments all on one store are quite small.
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 - 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.
Because when Gmail goes down or gets hacked, it'll be in beta so you'll have no reason to complain. When your corporate mail server goes down or gets hacked, it'll be the end of the world.
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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
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".
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.
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.
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Low Email storage limits are another reason why IT's reputation continues to worsen. If an internet company can offer 2GB+ of email storage to millions of users for FREE, then why can my large company offer more than 100MB of email storage to five thousand professional staff?
Because that's how the Internet Company makes it's money. They make money by giving mass amounts of storage to people who will use their service and view ads based on the content of the email. In other companies, email is a cost center. It costs more money to give that much storage. If we were to provide 2GB of storage for each of our users, we would have to have well over 3TB space on the email server. That costs money and the company doesn't want to spend it.
On the email system I manage (Exchange 2000) for 1600 users, we have a limit of 75MB per mailbox. Rediculously small, yes, but when you only have 200GB total, including larger mailboxes for marketing, VP level and higher and service accounts that send and receive a huge quantity of large messages and management doesn't want to spend money, that's what you get. We set Outlook to automatically empty Deleted Items except for those that want to store messages in their deleted items (Wha--???????? - [I shrug] whatever you say...) and have their "recover from deleted items" purge themselves after 2 months. The good news is we are about to upgrade our email system to about 1TB storage. We will likely edge the mailbox sizes up, but won't tell anyone. If we did, they'd start expecting unlimited storage again. Besides, we continue to grow. We've nearly doubled in size in the six years I've been there. Yes, it gets expensive when you need to provide some rediculous number of 9's worth of uptime. Having an email server cluster that is replicated to a duplicate cluster at the DR site gets quite expensive. Want massive uptime for the same price? Pay for it in storage.
Oh, and a 10MB per message limit. Once they get a few of those and fill their mailbox, they delete the hundreds of tiny messages before finally calling me. I explain the difference between byte, kilobytes and megabytes and explain that this one email takes up the space of 10,000 of these smaller ones. Yes, they need training. I've already put it in the company newsletter. You know those things don't apply to them.
Yes, it's been a long day. I'll shut up now.
But why is the rum gone?
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....
This macro will remove attachments from the current selection of mail items in Outlook. Pretty handy ...
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.