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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.
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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.
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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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. :
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!
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
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.
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.
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- AMW
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
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.
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E-mail is not a good correspondence/document storage system, but it works for most ordinary human beings. So they use it for that. And taking away that functionality is counteproductive to the needs of the actual system users.
sPh
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
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.
Trouble is there isn't one.
You wouldn't think of keeping all of your snail mail in a single box.
Actually, if I had a simple, automatic way of copying the entire thing and searching it, I most certainly would.
Contrary to common belief, users don't use their email as a universal archive to annoy IT departments, they do it because they don't have a better option. The reason they don't have a better option, is graphically demonstrated from the numerous replies in this forum suggesting things like "FTP" and "CVS" as suitable alternatives.