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'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
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
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. :
We have a limit of exactl
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.
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
Appropriate punishment.
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.
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.
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....
What!? Why do you get to dictate what e-mail is for?
E-mail is a service used by employees to get work done. In the case of marketing/sales types, 1GB of saved e-mail is common, and it's critical business data. Yes, some of that data is binary, but it is critical.
Often administrators impose quotas, let the users whine a bit, and then the whining subsides. The adminstrators think that the problem is solved; nope, what actually happened is that all that critical e-mail just got moved to local folders. When that local hard disk inevitably crashes, taking the critical data for a $1 million sales deal along with it, the whining will turn to screaming.
The solution (in my opinion) is for administrators and companies to reevaluate how much e-mail is worth to users. For many, I'd argue it's worth many thousands of dollars. I'm sure some of that money could be used for a reasonable amount of storage.