MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes

prawnonthebarbie writes "Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."

Comments

People actually do this?

[Samir Gupta]

Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.

Re:People actually do this?

[rsilvergun]

If you're a sales rep with decent leeway, you just give out a gmail address to your contacts instead of your corporate address. What IT don't know can't hurt you :)

Re:People actually do this?

[Erris]

Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.

But they still force the use of Outlook? Does this decision come from the same people who banned cellphones with cameras but not cameras themselves? Only cluelessness is obvious about policies like that. Must be a Microsoft partner office.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the company is worried about intellectual property they should implement a suitable secure VPN back to the network. Policies are put in place for a reason and an individual thinking they can act outside of the policy could risks losing their job. If the sales rep has sufficient need for remote access and the company doesn't provide a secure means to mail then the sales rep should present the options to management, one being the insecure external web based mail option. Management will have the option to provide an adequate solution, allow for use of the external web based email, or they can be a road block by ignoring the problem. In any case, the sales rep can justify their actions based on managements decision (i.e. if management ignores the problem, the sales rep can follow the policy and delay responses to email until they get back in the office per managements decision).

Jim

Re:People actually do this?

[catbutt]

Policies are put in place for a reason and an individual thinking they can act outside of the policy could risks losing their job. And a company thinking they can be fascist about everything risks losing their employees.

A free market is a beautiful thing.

Re:People actually do this?

[wandazulu]

Absolutely. In law firms it's almost de rigeur to have a gig or more in your mailbox. Lawyers are required to keep everything they get for a case and that includes emails which may have attachments, multiple versions of the attachments, etc. Some firms can have SANs devoted entirely to their mail server, plus clustering, etc. While the rank-n-file get fixed-size mailboxes, attorneys are unlimited.

What's funny is that the attorney database is segregated so it gets backup priority; if you just work at the help desk or are an assistant or some such, you may or may not lose your email in a bad crash (that presumably took out both boxes), but attorneys have a pretty high confidence they won't lose anything (which, given the nature of the business, is a good idea, really).

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

Conversely, if I'm looking at spending a rather significant amount of money and find a sales droid using a gmail address rather then their corporate email address, I consider that a disqualifying condition for that company.

I consider it somewhere between a commentary on the company's ability to manage their own infrastructure, inability to manage information securely, or just plain stupidity on the part of their sales droid.

Either way, if there is a significant budget involved, I move on.

Re:People actually do this?

[Richard_at_work]

Yes, because having a policy against idiotic acts like placing corporate data in third party services that have absolutely no contingency plan for access in the event something unspeakable happens to you and no guarantees of availability or security of data is facist....

I think your post symbolises very well the cheapness that certain terms and words have been lowered to on Slashdot.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

And a company that doesn't implement any policies will likely be out of business anyways. We're not talking about breaking say a dress code policy we're talking about sales data here. Losing an account because someone underbids you due to knowing what your rates are is an example of email policy intentions. If you don't agree with the policy then work to change it. You'll find that most (not all) have a reasonable purpose that might not be apparent to you. So do you think the policy against viewing "obscene" material is fascist too? What about diversity, export control, computer usage (i.e. using a company resource to do a "side business" project), etc...?

Jim

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

an individual thinking they can act outside of the policy could risks losing their job

No.

"They" is ONLY PLURAL.

Individuals thinking they can act outside of the policy could risk losing their jobs.

An individual thinking she can act outside of the policy could risk losing her job.

Got it now?

Re:People actually do this?

[Jason Earl]

Yes, you probably would. However, you probably also wouldn't do business with a salesdroid that bounced your emails because his inbox was limited to 25M. In the end most purchasing agents and sales reps aren't technical people. They don't care where the email ends up as long as it gets answered. They're just normal people trying to get their job done with the tools given them.

Re:People actually do this?

[ErikTheRed]

And a company thinking they can be fascist about everything risks losing their employees.

Geez, do you even know what the word "fascist" means? Hint: check Wikipedia, Dictionary.com or even Google. I'm pretty sure that a company wanting to protect its intellectual property and trade secrets hardly qualifies. As someone who has dealt with some corporate espionage cases, I can personally say that such policies are hardly paranoid or based on far-fetched situations. There are innumerable instances of employees taking product information, customer information, etc. to competitors when they switch jobs - or even outright working for a competitor before the switch. Keeping the e-mail in-house provides documentation of many such occurances. Yes, I know that it's easy to work around this. But the vast majority of the time, people are pretty stupid about such things. Sometimes it's worth prosecuting, but most of the time it just slides.

If employees want to have personal e-mail, they're perfectly free to do so - outside of the company network. Inside the company, the rule is that if it's created on our equipment and / or stored on our servers, we own it. There's plenty of legal precident for this (IANAL, do your own research / buy your own opinions).

In any case, if you're going to engage in name-calling, please do so intelligently. See George Orwell's rant on the subject here. It's getting to the point where the word "fascism" - a thoroughly vile and evil concept that has resulted in the deaths of tens (or possible hundreds) of millions of people over the last century has been watered down to the point where it's used to describe "something I don't like and lack the intelligence to properly rebuke, so I'll just engage in ridiculous hyperbole while demonstrating my massive ignorance."

Fuck, now everybody's going to call me a fascist :-)

Re:People actually do this?

[dave562]

And to take it one step further, a lot of firms, especially financial firms in the wake of SOX are archiving their emails. So although your average user might not have a 2GB mailbox on the Exchange server, odds are there there is a huge multi-multi-gigabyte SQL database on the back-end with a record of every email transaction that has taken place.

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

Correct again. That's just as strong an indication of corporate incompetence.

If they can't even hire someone to run a mail server, and/or can't afford the hardware (including drives) and/or outsource it, they're probably not in a position to support the products they're selling, and may not even be around in the future to offer upgrades.

Re:People actually do this?

[PermanentMarker]

The answer to such environments is contignous mail backup/archiving solutions.
Exchange is an atomic DB with transaction logging.
This means mail can be restored till the moment of crass.

Archiving is a seperate product for ex2000 or ex2003
But if you like to in Ex2007 you can trough the GUI create a rule to put older email to a different database for backup, for example one with slower I/O troughput as older mail is often less used.
Or what you can also do under exchange 2007 create a copy database.
This doesn't demand high I/O as its only a copy to which also the transaction logs are purged. But it is a functional DB which can easily be made active.

The reason for that last option, well 95% of mail system crashes is caused by disk hardware failures (SAN problems etc..)

Well ex2007 is quite new (even to me) but its an intresting product with new options on availibility compared to its older versions.

Most thing i like in it is probaply SIP integration for your phone centre and the understanding of human voice command in a language spoken way (not like press 1 for.. pres 2 foor but just normal sentence).

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

We get an automated email message that indicates that we are approaching the max allocated size for our mail box. I also believe you can configure the mail server to allow incoming messages, even if the mail box size is exceeded, but disallow sending email messages until the mail box size is under the limit. I'm also guessing that tools exist to profile mail box size information so policies can be updated, users can be informed of how to manage their mail better, or exceptions can be put into place for particular users/groups. If users are permitted 2 GB of storage, guess what, they'll use all 2GB. Give them 8GB and they'll use 8GB. Increasing the storage beyond some reasonable amount will just lead to users who become to lazy to clean out their mail boxes.

Jim

Re:People actually do this?

[poliopteragriseoapte]

Gmail makes workers more efficient (much easier to manage one's email, accessible from mobile phones, etc). Most companies would be better off by giving their email to manage to Google via Gmail for Your Domain, and focus on more core competencies than email. Of course, the IT departments may not necessarily like this... And no, I am definitely not a Google employee.

Re:People actually do this?

[rblancarte]

Good thing you are an Anonymous Coward, because you clearly are wrong in this case...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Re:People actually do this?

[Atlantis-Rising]

Actually, 'they' can also be used as a gender-neutral singular. Wiki article.

Technically, the grandparent was correct, and you are incorrect.

Re:People actually do this?

[darkmeridian]

Don't forget the document retention policies that delete all mail after a certain period of time, such as sixty days. How many people are racking up 2 gigs of email in sixty days? And of those who do, should they be?

Document retention policies do not.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all fine, except there is no gender neutral singular pronoun in English, so it's long been understood that "they" can/does function as a singular as well, no matter what your copy of strunk & white may say on the matter.. Language, by definition is a fluid, evolving thing and English is clearly lacking in this case, so many speakers/writers have filled the void with an obvious choice that is more or less universally understood, except by individuals such as yourself who seem to view English the way the French view their mawkish mother tongue. Got it now?

Re:People actually do this?

[Liquid-Gecka]

Remember though, Lots of domains are hosted by GMail, like *@google.com and such. The new hosted system is what this is targeting.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for IBM and I have an IBM e-mail account I use for 99% of my correspondence. However, sometimes customers will send in e-mails that for some reason don't get through, are too big, etc... (It's amazing how large of files customer will try to e-mail you--50MB trace files are not .) In these circumstances, I have a Gmail account I use sometimes to workaround this. I would hope that if you ever deal with IBM and are provided with a GMail account to e-mail something to, you would voice your concern instead of dismissing the company out of hand. As always, there are many ways to send things in, e-mail is just one of the most convenient for customers.

Re:People actually do this?

[killjoe]

Maybe they just wanted a more flexible way to sort their emails. Outlook filters suck and exchange doesn't support tags.

Aside from that. What does it say about you and your company if your decisions of what products and services to buy are based on peoples email addresses?

Re:People actually do this?

[Reapman]

BZZT wrong. Sure if your some small company then ya maybe not a big deal. However as a Government or major Enterprise level organization, storing our email, which may contain personal information on the citizens of the country / shareholder information, on a server that we have no direct control over, is beyond stupid, from both privacy and a "that would make the front page of a newspaper in a bad way"

Oh look Google got sued for xyz and as such are forced to shut down their email servers until it's straightened out... good thing we use them for all our email! Not likely to happen any time soon but doesn't mean it can't.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and, here's another good discussion of the issue: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/16/143616/593

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

It says I care about professionalism...

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

If the company outsources to Gmail, I don't have a problem with that.

I can access all my mail from my desktop mail client (Outlook, including mail folders Calendars, Tasks, Notes, Contacts; Thunderbird including mail folders and contacts; most other mail clients), 100% of the same is available via the webmail interface.

I also have access my mail from any WML capable device including mail folders, I can access all of my content from any XHTML capable device.

I also have email pushed to my Treo and available online and offline (offline access being limited to messages retrieved when I was online, of course), including all my mail folders, my Calendar, Tasks, Notes, and Contact list.

And all of that on a Win32 install-out-of-the-box mail server.

*shrugs*

Each to their own.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to review "they" (Merriam-Webster), particularly the section "The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts." indefinite number can refer to one just as easily as any other number.

Jim

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

I have no issue at all if a company decides to outsource to Google for their mail hosting. My issue is only when a company doesn't decide that, but an employee does.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of domains are hosted by GMail, like *@google.com and such.

Are you a retard or just playing one?

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

My experience has been that sales guys don't get it -- They usually have little concept of professionalism, and even less respect for corporate structure unless it helps them to make the sale at all costs.

If sales is allowed to rule the roost, it's usually a sign of a corporate structure that doesn't wow me.

If sales is kept reined in, I'm a happy guy.

If someone asks me to use a Gmail account for a specific need, I don't have a problem with that -- It's when they use it exclusively...

Re:People actually do this?

[rob1980]

Fascist! :)

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry...my comment above was meant for the person you replied to. I was just backing up your reference.

Jim

Re:People actually do this?

[Leiterfluid]

This is true. I am the primary Exchange administrator for my organization, and we intentionally limit most employee mailboxes to 60MB. This is because your e-mail client is not a god damned filesystem . Email messages by themselves should not be more than a few KB, even with the overhead of using MS Word-rich text or MS HTML. Attachments are the problem, and we instruct our users to save the attachments to the filesystem where they can be cataloged and index with by the indexing server. This culture of storing everything in your mailbox leads to bad business practices, and an IT management nightmare.

Re:People actually do this?

[AK Marc]

Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.

Unless I missed it in the policies manual, not a single one of my employers ever forbade anything of that nature. Well, my current one lists BCC as a fireable offense, but nothing about forwarding emails. Why BCC would be outlawed but not forwarding, I couldn't guess, but that's the policy.

Re:People actually do this?

[walt-sjc]

There are solutions to the attachment problem. Third-party products exists which pull them out of the message store and keep them separate. But yes, I have seen moronic users use the email server as a way of backup up their desktop.

All in all, I just don't care for exchange. It's overly complex for what it does. Things that should be easy aren't.

Re:People actually do this?

[walt-sjc]

Of course anyone that really thinks email is private (outside of using encryption such as PGP of course) no matter WHERE it is stored is naive, as most server to server activity is in the clear. Of course it's possible to configure many modern MTA's to do TLS (server to server,) VERY VERY few sites have it setup. Most message stores are NOT encrypted in any way, and most MUA to MSA/MTA communication is not either.

Re:People actually do this?

[walt-sjc]

Unless your company uses VPN's / encryption for all communication, email isn't private / secure at all anyway. It's amazing how few companies understand security even at the most basic levels or they think it is too hard / cumbersome to use.

Re:People actually do this?

[EnderWiggnz]

why the hell should i have too move my files around, and tend after them.

they're already in the email program, keep them there. i like it there, its all in one place, and its searchable.

stop making me move my shit all over the palce, i cant find it that way.

Re:People actually do this?

[EnderWiggnz]

But, I hand someone my business card, and it has my work email address, I've set GMail up to respond from that email address, so the customer doesnt know.

What is your problem again? Lack of control, big guy? Afraid someone will make your Kingdom obsolete.

here's the truth: email is a commodity, and companies spend an extraordinary amount of money implementing it badly, individually.

Re:People actually do this?

[arivanov]

Nope they aren't. Fingerprint is different.

Gmail is not greylisting friendly and quite obviously sends out from a cluster which does not maintain per destination state.

Gmail for your domain maintains state and sends correctly from same relay to same destination overtime.

So while you are correct that google seems to be eating its own dogfood and using its hosted system for corporate mail, it is not Gmail as such. It is the Gmail-for-your-domain which is Gmail only in name for marketing reasons (as any sysadmin who runs a mailserver can tell you looking at his logs).

As far as the content of the article, yep, I know the story. We have a fledging PHB who wants to migrate an existing unix IMAP server with some mailboxes exceeding 5G and 40K mails to an exchange (I will not go why, but human stupidity knows no limits especially when the people weilding it can call it a business driver). It will be a very entertaining one to watch.

Re:People actually do this?

[famikon]

Then join your IT dept and come up with a way to make that a convenient system to manage. Until then, stop bitching.

Re:People actually do this?

[evil_Tak]

If you'd actually read the article you linked, you'd know that, despite common usage, the singular generic they is still a matter of controversy among grammarians.

IMO it's horribly unclear, particularly when used in a sentence like, "A teenage boy never plans for their future," one of the accepted uses from the article. It gets even worse once combined with the propensity of most people to confuse its, it's, their, they're, there, to, two, too, who's, whose, and the like.

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

Control? No...

Accountability, reliability, data security and privacy come to mind.

Re:People actually do this?

[macdaddy]

Repeat after me: Email is not a File Transfer Protocol. Likewise, Public Folders is not a File Server.

Re:People actually do this?

[pluther]

Email is not a File Transfer Protocol. Likewise, Public Folders is not a File Server.

But people use it that way.

And, more importantly, gmail lets people use it that way, and supports it.

So if that's the way everyone wants to use it, doesn't it make sense to try to support that, rather than to try to convince users not to do it?

Re:People actually do this?

[EatHam]

what a bunch of fucking nerds.

Re:People actually do this?

[neurovish]

I guess it depends on the government. In Florida, all government correspondence is considered public record. If the local newspaper wants to come in and look at an employee's email, they're free to do so....of course there's some bureaucratic hoops involved, but nothing that they aren't used to going through.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It gets even worse once combined with the propensity of most people to confuse its, it's, their, they're, there, to, two,

Well, we know the bible is against them homophone's right?

Re:People actually do this?

[Reapman]

Missing the point here... going with what your saying, there's no need for government computers to be wiped, because all data is free and wild? Wow really, well I hope you complain the next time there's a news report about this saying to leave the poor government alone. No. Just no. How do you deal with email retention policies? Privacy laws that may dictate you keep all records of email, "deleted" or otherwise, for xyz years? If you care about your data, and it's your job to care about data, you don't give it to a 3rd party "personal email storage" company. You take care of it yourself and have backups that you can get at whenever you need, not rely on someone you don't have an SLA with.

Someone screws up the email server at Google not much you can do... someone screws up your corporate email server you can deal with it and fix it.

Re:People actually do this?

[beezly]

You deserve everything you get if you use grey listing at your site. It's an ugly, ugly hack.

Re:People actually do this?

[Syrrh]

That depends on your budget. At my workplace there isn't even an attempted solution to the mail storage/backup dilemma. Exchange server storage is limited. Well gee, if that storage space is so tight, obviously there's also no budget for generic network storage either. So the result is that most of the packrats just buy an external hard drive and do their own backups. Problem solved. They can keep all the bullshit ancient e-mail archives they want. And they do. Granted, some are under legal paranoia requiring such measures, but IT makes no special favors to help them.

Outlook is perfectly capable of storing a ridiculous amount of data in local files, especially with the recent changes in file formats to allow >2GB. There is little reason to abuse servers by storing this info remotely, it's certainly not cost-effective. After upgrade costs to handle the added bandwidth, extra hardware maintenance, and tape archival work, it's a rather expensive fix for a minimal problem.

Re:People actually do this?

[Gilmoure]

I am an indefinite number of one. *SOB* /goes to drown sorrow with cheap Guinness and whiskey

Re:People actually do this?

[gamer4Life]

GMail actually has a feature where you can reply using a different e-mail address and domain as gmail.com. As long as you can receive mail from that e-mail address, it lets you do this. This is great for handling multiple e-mails if you're part of different organizations, or for consolidating personal and work e-mail together (while filtering them into different labels).

Re:People actually do this?

[killjoe]

So you are completely against using hosted exchange servers then?

Re:People actually do this?

[h2_plus_O]

You can create a local store and keep them on your hard drive if you must. You can auto-archive items more than n days old. That way they remain searchable, you can retain many gigs of your stuff, before you too realize that most of that stuff should be thrown out and you'll never use it.

The point is that keeping lots of stuff on yer server makes your IT people crazy. There's alternatives, but mostly they seem (as far as my experience goes) to be a waste of time. I mean, I have a couple gigs of storage on my server, and all that means is that when I finally get the email notification (your account is nearly out of space, jackass) I have a ton of stuff to filter through to decide if I need to retain.

Re:People actually do this?

[killjoe]

No it doesn't. It says you are small minded bigot who makes major decisions based on irrelevant criteria.

Not everybody want to host their own mail servers you know. What about people who use google for hosting their domain MX records. You know google offers that too right? So the mail you sent to joeblowinc.com may actually be hosted on the google mail servers (GASP!!!). Do you check the MX records to see if that's the case too?

What if they are using a hosted exchange server is that acceptable to you or do you only buy goods and services from people who host their own exchange server?

What else do you check about their email servers? Do you check to see if they are running sendmail or postfix and only give your business to people who run postfix? What if they are running qmail do you kick them out of the office and tell them to never come back?

Are you only bigoted about gmail addresses or do you also discriminate against people who have .mac email addresses too?

In my mind any corporation that uses exchange is being run by idiots but hey I don't base my decisions solely what they use to host their emails.

Re:People actually do this?

[killjoe]

"Accountability, reliability, data security and privacy come to mind."

In that case you should investigate who is hosting the email server of all your vendors. Only when you have determined that the email servers are being hosted by a reputable company should you do business with someone. For example if company A makes a proposal to sell you a product which would save you some money but they are not hosting their own mail servers and instead are relying on a hosted exchange server providor you have never heard of then you should not buy their product.

Re:People actually do this?

[Reapman]

"Sure if your some small company then ya maybe not a big deal. However as a Government or major Enterprise level organization, "

I hardly call that totally against.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

> inability to manage information securely

Because if it's a non-Gmail account it's gotta be more secure? Please.

Re:People actually do this?

[trentblase]

Does SMTP transfer files? Yep, did it the other day. Is SMTP a protocol? I mean, it's got the P in there.

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

.mac, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, I put them all in the same category... Domains are cheap, learning to use one isn't tough, and it's easy enough to put a hosted solution on the domain.

It also more or less guarantees that I'm talking to an authorized representative of the company (or if I'm not, the company is at fault) -- If I'm using the sales guy's @gmail.com address and he leaves, want to make a bet whether he'll turn in his personal gmail address to the company, or keep using it (and potentially keep acting as a representative of that company?)

It's simply a matter of professionalism. I don't care if you want to outsource to Gmail, or Hotmail, or any private label, or run your own system colocated, leased, inhouse, or whatever else floats your boat.

And no, I'm not an Exchange admin or user (well, I do use CRM at one of my clients' sites, technically it uses Exchange, but happily I do not admin it)

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

No, but if a corporate account gets compromised, it's the corporation's responsiblity.

If some assclown on a Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo account gets their account compromised, it's a "what do you expect"

More importantly, if the employee leaves, their corporate account will get terminated or rerouted to an appropriate place, or even just get /dev/null'd... Vs my continuing correspondence with someone who may well now be working for a competitor...

Re:People actually do this?

[baldass_newbie]

Does SMTP transfer files? Yep, did it the other day. Is SMTP a protocol? I mean, it's got the P in there.

And it's got a 'T', too!
How about that!

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

An important thing to understand about fascism is that it is not some way-out-there unimaginable extreme. Read up on the Nuremberg Trials sometime. Never dehumanize your enemy. WWII Germans were people just like you and me. If you forget that, you forget one of history's greatest lessons.

I'm not saying that the word 'fascist' isn't used a little too liberally. I am saying, though, that scoffing at any suggestion that all the good people you know could be sent a little off-kilter would be equally naive.

Re:People actually do this?

[walt-sjc]

Yes, you did miss the point.

The point is that most email traverses the internet in the clear and can be easily snooped. Just because Bob sends Sally an email doesn't mean that Fred and Barney won't read it too.

I do agree with you that government / corp users shouldn't be using gmail and such, but *where* email is stored is only 1/2 of the problem. I'm just saying don't ignore the other half.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucker! corporate email is not my property, it belongs to the company. So this packrat do not care what you or my IT do with such property -it is the company's duty to have a data storage and IT to provide and maintain.

packrat to sucker,,,

Re:People actually do this?

[slash.dt]

if you're a sales rep with decent leeway, you just give out a gmail address to your contacts instead of your corporate address. What IT don't know can't hurt you

You print your own business cards? You must work in a small company.

If you tried that trick at our work that would be considered to be actively working against the company and you would be out the door pretty quickly.

Re:People actually do this?

[saridder]

It just goes to show that most modern day IT departments aren't keeping up with the demands of business. They're so focused on keeping the lights on and maintaining that staus quo instead of innovation, that the users are going outside of corporate IT to get thier job done. Sales reps and even high end Wall St bankers are going to starbucks to work with a client, as they usually can't get on the corporate network, or it's a hassle to do. They're now forwarding email to Gmail so they can have a decent storage. They're now using public sharing sites to exchange large files.

The big question is not should that revenue generating user be fired, but how do we transform our internal IT departments to meet the demands of today's business.

Re:People actually do this?

[drsmithy]

This is true. I am the primary Exchange administrator for my organization, and we intentionally limit most employee mailboxes to 60MB. This is because your e-mail client is not a god damned filesystem . Email messages by themselves should not be more than a few KB, even with the overhead of using MS Word-rich text or MS HTML. Attachments are the problem, and we instruct our users to save the attachments to the filesystem where they can be cataloged and index with by the indexing server. This culture of storing everything in your mailbox leads to bad business practices, and an IT management nightmare.

The real problem here is that, despite its inadequacies, email is the best solution people have found for storing, transferring and referencing their data.

The real solution, therefore, is not to lambast people about using email as a "filesystem" and/or beat them over the head with ridiculously low inbox quotas, it's to implement something functionally as good (or better) that you find more to your administrative tastes, and then show people how to use it.

Re:People actually do this?

[jc42]

Repeat after me: Email is not a File Transfer Protocol.

Huh? How do you think your email gets from one machine to another, if not via a file transfer protocol? That's exactly what email is. If it weren't, you'd never be able to get a message.

And furthermore, your email is stored in a file system, either on your machine or on the server. If it's not in a file system, there's no way your computer could remember it after a reboot.

Of course, storing email on a server controlled by an outsider is an invitation to disaster, if you have any information there that you don't want competitors to see. ISPs are in business to make money, as is google. If they see profit in selling your email to someone, they'll do it.

(Jeez; what are they teaching the newbs these days? ;-)

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.

• As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
• Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
• A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
• Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
• Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own.
• Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
• Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative spelling". If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
• Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel. Without the efforts of people involved with the GNU project , MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux kernel would not be very useful to most people.
• Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive others of their freedom.
• There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution.

From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy

Re:People actually do this?

[timmarhy]

err seriously your embarressing yourself here. smtp is not a file transder protocol. there's a hugh difference between to 2 on a techincal level. try to send a 100 meg file as an attachment then do the same using ftp and see which gets there sooner. the main problem is that email gets retransmitted atleast 3 times to get to it's destination. if people had any brains they would provide a LINK to the data they want you to download.

Re:People actually do this?

[Mike_ya]

A couple years ago we stopped allowing employees from autofowarding. After one individual who forwarded their mail went on vacation and allowed their Comcast email box to fill up. So email would be forwarded, it would bounce back with a mailbox full message, that message would get forwarded then bounced back, then forwarded etc. The Exchange mailbox ended up around 5 gigs when I noticed all the traffic on the mail server. We usually limit mailbox sizes to 150Meg, but this individual was one of the 'important' people who couldn't be bothered with managing the size of their mailbox. Really the only reason we keep limits on the mailboxes is that it takes so freakin long to do mailbox level backups in exchange. The faster the backups can go the more space the employees can have.

Re:People actually do this?

[killjoe]

"and it's easy enough to put a hosted solution on the domain."

Whoa!. What makes you sure the hosting company is secure and respects your privacy? Any idiot can form a hosting company and there are billions out there that charge five bucks a month. What makes you think that any of those companies are more "respectable" then google? You claim that you can not trust gmail.com what makes you think you can trust some_cheap_hosting.com?

"It's simply a matter of professionalism. "

You keep using that word but I don't think you know what it means. Professionalism isn't about making buying decisions based on an email address. Sorry to break it to you.

What's amazing to me is that your "diligence" goes no further then checking the domain of the email address. You are perfectly willing to cut a deal with a company using some fly by night hosting service or even hosting the mail server at the sales persons home DSL line but refuse to do business with a company hosting their emails at world class infrastructure like google, microsoft and yahoo have.

Your inability to properly evaluate the risks you may encounter when dealing with a company tells volumes about what kind of a person you are and what kind of a company you run. Risk management is an important (if not the most important) skill of a manager at any level. A manager who is unable to assess risks properly and makes judgments based on completely stupid and baseless risk factors while ignoring other obvious risks is an incompetent manager and their business should fire them right away.

If you worked for me and you said you chose company A over company B to provide service X because the company B sales person gave you a gmail.com email address you would be fired on the spot. If I did a little digging and found out that company A was hosting their mail servers at some_cheap_hosting.com then I might even sue you for negligence.

Re:People actually do this?

[blane.bramble]

No, SMTP does not transfer files. SMTP transfers plain text messages. MIME can be used to encode a file in such a way that it can be embedded into an SMTP message. SMTP is not a file transfer protocol.

Re:People actually do this?

[ChunkyLoverYYZ]

Real world... most sales guys do this with their bigger clients. They may have their "official e-mail on the business card, but they give out their personal e-mail and cell. If they ever leave the company, they still have that pool of contacts. Unethical, maybe... but it's reality. I think it's pretty much accepted in a lot of companies unless it's really abused. It can also work FOR the company... when they hire a new sales guy, along comes his entire professional network. On the larger Exchange mailbox size... in my experience, most companies have quotas against such large mailboxes anyway, just to prevent everyone in the company from having 2GB each. My current quota is 100MB... which I do think is a little small for these days. But I get by.

Re:People actually do this?

[gfreeman]

More likely they have 50MB on the Exchange server, and a gig-or-more .pst or three/four/five that sit on a file server (or even locally and get backed up to the file server ...)

I support the legal team for a top-ten-global-company, and that's standard practice. 50MB on Exchange, the rest in personal folders.

Re:People actually do this?

[sasdrtx]

Ha! Good one. Have you ever met a systems administrator that gave a crap about what users wanted or needed? Half of them get their jollies bossing around the lusers, the other half are geeks who care only about their preciousss servers.

I'm not quite as cynical as I sound in general... I just generally don't post unless something pisses me off. Hmmm... sounds like a sig.

But yes, it would make sense. What you said. Refer to Gmail.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then I guess we agree lol. I wasn't attempting to say xyz is uber safe and unhackable, I mearly ment that using gmail for corporate is crazy and not the answer. Pointing out email is unsecure is like saying running Windows 98 without a firewall is a bad idea... no KIDDING.

Re:People actually do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...

Yes, people actually do this. In my case, the company I work for not only has a size limit on my mailbox, but also only lets us read our mail if we are first logged into a VPN. I cannot even begin to describe how annoying that gets when you need access to your email anywhere other than sitting in front of your office computer. It'd be one thing if email wasn't a big part of my job, but almost ALL of my job involves reading and replying to email in a timely fashion, so being out of contact is not really an option.

We aren't allowed to set up aliases to external email addresses, either, so I ended up coming up with a homebrew solution of my own that sets some out of office rules to forward my mail to another external account, where it is received and processed with procmail and some Perl scripting to clean up the headers, and that way I can read and reply to email from my own mail server which is under my control, and accessible via IMAP and SMTP with SSL authentication.

The bottom line for me is that email is plain text communication. Other than exchange user -> exchange user email where both sender and recipient are on the same server, that email is going to go out over the Internet in plain text eventually. Putting it on the other side of a VPN does basically nothing for your corporate security when it comes to customer-facing email. If what you have to say is that sensitive, pick up the phone, meet in person, or hell, encrypt your email for that matter. I'm of the opinion that if whatever you're doing is worth keeping secret, then it's worth not putting it in a plain text format on the Internet in the first place.

Re:People actually do this?

[Syrrh]

Wow. You do an excellent job putting words in his mouth.

Soooo... what if he's doing business with xyzcorp, and sees the sales schmuck has an e-mail address in a crapmail.biz domain? I'd guess he would consider that just as stupid as a freebie mail account.

See, the neat thing about domain names is that they usually reflect the name of the company that runs the mailserver.

Re:People actually do this?

[macdaddy]

I agree with timmarhy. You're embarrassing the hell out of yourself. Email is not a file transfer protocol. I've been a mail admin (Sendmail, at that!) for well over decade, junior. I've seen what jackasses using email to transfer files can do. Do you have any idea how many mail systems crashed in November of 1998 when people from around the globe started emailing the 26MB Star Wars Episode on trailer to all their friends? It brought system to their knees if not farther. Go find yourself a real mail admin and ask their opinion.

Re:People actually do this?

[bill_mcgonigle]

But yes, I have seen moronic users use the email server as a way of backup up their desktop.

Odds are these 'moronic' users didn't have a better, easier way to backup their desktop or lacked training.

Re:People actually do this?

[ErikTheRed]

True enough, but at a practical level it's more difficult to sniff a message in transit (well, at least on the ends I control :-) ) than it is to attack the endpoint.

What really cracks me up is people that think services like Hushmail are secure. Heh heh heh. Poor bastards.

Re:People actually do this?

[smparadox]

"So if that's the way everyone wants to use it, doesn't it make sense to try to support that, rather than to try to convince users not to do it?"

HERESY!!!!!!

Recant, or we shall be forced to bring out...

...the Comfy Chair©

Re:People actually do this?

[MightyYar]

No? I'm a mechanical engineer and would probably not be very useful in IT. That said, it seems that IT often forgets who is supposed to be supporting whom. If I need to do something "outside the box" set up by IT, then IT should want to know why and how to accommodate my unforeseen need - this hostility toward users is way out of line. Same team, same team. A secretary should not need to know that "email is a bad place for files". From her perspective, it's a pretty dumb system that lets you send and receive files, but not store them.

Re:People actually do this?

[MightyYar]

You can repeat that as much as you like, but it won't make an email system that gracefully handles files any less desired or useful. Email is not a File Transfer Protocol? Why not? Public Folders is not a File Server? Why? Because Microsoft says so? What happened to giving users the tools they need to efficiently do their jobs?

Re:People actually do this?

[MightyYar]

A link, eh? Is that what Outlook does when you hit the "Attach" button? No? Why not?

This kind of crap should be handled by the application, not the user.

Re:People actually do this?

[macdaddy]

They already have the tools needed to efficiently do their job. For file storage and access there are file servers. For accessing these file servers we have customized file transfer protocols that have been designed with resiliency, security, and efficiency in mind. I can dig a whole in the ground with the claw on a claw hammer. That doesn't mean it's correct. I should use a shovel. Actually, were it me I'd use our backhoe. It's a helluva lot easier.

Re:People actually do this?

[MightyYar]

I wouldn't expect the secretary to dig holes - that's not her job.

Similarly, I wouldn't expect her to know that a file on a file server is more efficient than a file in Outlook.

IT gives her the wrong tools, even though their job is to support her, and then compains when she uses them in a way that is "wrong" even though it does exactly what she wants.

Re:People actually do this?

[killjoe]

"See, the neat thing about domain names is that they usually reflect the name of the company that runs the mailserver."

Exactly how stupid are you? Have you ever heard of "outsourcing"?. You see most companies are not in the business of providing email services. Most smart companies know to outsource their email servers and concentrate on their core competency.

So your company could be "mysupercompany.com" but your email server could be run by godaddy.com, rackspace.com, google.com or some_cheap_fly_by_night_hosting_company.co.ru.

You being the stupid ass judge the company on whether the sales persons card has the proper domain name in the email address. So you would trust a company that has outsourced their email handling to a fly by night operator in the ukraine over somebody who uses gmail because you (in your complete and utter ignorance) think that the fly by night operator in the ukraine is more reliable, trustable, and professional then google.

Re:People actually do this?

[trentblase]

Yeah, and USPS doesn't deliver letters. USPS delivers envelopes. Letters can be put inside of envelopes. USPS is not a letter delivery service.

Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[RobGeek]

We seem to have some users with 8GB and larger mailboxes today using Exchange 2003. The site is slashdotted. Any explanation as to why 2GB mailboxes would be something new and useful?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[smbarbour]

1) Completely useless to have 2GB Mailboxes... That's what PST files are for

2) My wife, who has worked at the company for a year and a half, has already racked up at LEAST 8GB in ARCHIVED e-mail.

Microsoft... It's too little, too late. (and Google Desktop keeps everything within a quick lookup)

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Philosinfinity]

The summary is misleading, if not wholly inaccurate. The article basically states that MS is trying to urge companies that keep smaller mailbox quotas to bump them up to 2GB at least. Supposedly, the feature set of Exchange 2007 is supposed to make doing this more attractive to corporate IT departments.

Our department doesn't use quotas or any method of limiting mailbox sizes. In our site we have mailboxes upwards of 17GB. The main problem with this is that as of Exchange 2003, MS will not provide assistance resolving mailbox issues for mailboxes > 2GB.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[ednopantz]

>The summary is misleading, if not wholly inaccurate.

This is slashdot.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Muffhead]

Oddly I've got 4.3 GB, 4.1 GB, 3.9 GB, 3.9 GB, 3.2 GB, etc. News to me that Exchange can only now support 2 GB mailboxes. 2 GB archives however were rather painful.

But seriously a 25 - 50 MB mailbox is no use to anyone. I do fairly agressive cleanup & I'm at 220 MB. It would be nice if my users didn't keep so much, but if they need it, oh well.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Google Desktop.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because Exchange allows you to have an 8GB Mail box, doesn't mean that you can actually restore that of tape. Anything over 2GBs and either that mail box can't be restored or the entire Exchange Server can't be restored.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Philosinfinity]

PST files do not always work in areas where corporate compliance issues exist. Unfortunately, rogue PST files are the main reason why email archiving solutions require a discovery agent to be loaded on clients. If you are a publicly traded company and wind up in court, discovery can subpoena all relevant emails sent out in the past 7 years. Even if these emails are sitting off the exchange server and on a PST, the corporation is still responsible for presenting them.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[misleb]

2) My wife, who has worked at the company for a year and a half, has already racked up at LEAST 8GB in ARCHIVED e-mail.

It is a shame that people have to resort of abusing email to store/share files.

-matthew

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[operagost]

It's useless. IT departments impose draconian mailbox limits for the following reasons:

- Software can't handle it (too cheap to upgrade)
- Lack of server resources (too cheap to upgrade)
- "Email is not a storage system" (dogma and hyperbole)

Microsoft's DeAmicis's talk will convince no one to change anything. The latest MS Exchange (among most other corporate messaging systems) can easily handle 2 GB mailboxes.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[ipxodi]

Does Exchange 07 do away with the 16Gb limit for the mail store? Unless you have the "Enterprise" version of Exchange 2003, the total of all your mailboxes can't exceed 16GB. I'm at a company which is small enough to not want or need the added expense of Enterprise, but is large enough to be able to easily store 16Gb of mail total. I have about 50 users, each of whom I try to limit to 250-500 MB of mail. You do the math. I'm always after people to clean up the mailboxes. And don't say use archiving. Archiving sucks. Most users don't know how to use it, and those who try it often lose their archives.
If MS would just get rid of the store limit, life would be happy.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Detritus]

It isn't abuse if it gets the job done.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Otter]

2) My wife, who has worked at the company for a year and a half, has already racked up at LEAST 8GB in ARCHIVED e-mail...Microsoft... It's too little, too late. (and Google Desktop keeps everything within a quick lookup)

Beyond the issue of using email for file storage -- she keeps 8 gigs on GMail? How do I get 8 gigs from them?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[scotch]

Add to your list: - SOX compliance / legal issues

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[SparkEE]

Yeah, PST files are great! I love when I get an email over the weekend using Outlook Web Access, and the email I need to use to respond is sitting on my desktop at work, not accessible through the Web Browser. It was even better when my hard drive failed and I couldn't get to any of that mail until IT had the time to restore those PST files from backups.

This is just another example of the flawed logic of Windows users. That the desktop machine is the right place to store useful data. It makes for horrible loss in productivity when using multiple computers, inside or outside the office.

<rant>
Where I work, I often have to work in a lab room, away from my desktop. Rather than set up every lab computer the way I like to work, I end up Remote Desktop-ing to my office computer. This worked okay until the day my drive failed. When I got the computer back I spent nearly a week re-installing applications and still haven't spent the time to get my environment back the way I like it. It's just such a shame to be so tightly tied to a particular piece of hardware in this day. I'm pretty sure Windows provides some type of roaming profile thing to fix part of this, but they really need to get more server-centric and figure out how to execute compiled applications that live on another machine. That way I wouldn't have to install Vim, IAR, Xilinx, and Modelsim on every new lab machine I sit at.
</rant>

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Total_Wimp]

In general, this also precludes the clustering Microsoft is talking about that they claim will eliminate tape. In short, tape creates a daily trail. The user or admin could wipe out every single message on the Exchange database, and you'd still have historical data sitting safely at your off-site location.

Tapes are also important for the "oops!" factor. Sure, Exchanges has ways of dealing with this, such as deleted item retention, but those run out after 30 days by default(adjustable), long before your CEO realizes he needs that email he deleted in order to defend the company in court.

Clustered or synced data merely replicates the deletions or modifications. They also have a nasty tendency to replicate corruption (rare, but it does happen). Having real-time "backups" is great, but unless they're made to store data in an historical fashion, they can't replace tape.

TW

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Volante3192]

With Exchange Standard 2003 SP2 it's a 75GB limit. You do have to reghack it, but it's there. SP1 is still 16GB total.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[illegalcortex]

Typically, Windows users do what the software tells them to. No logic is involved. I know I've never used a PST file and always kept my mail on the server.

In reality, the world is different today than it was back when POPing your messages down to your local machine was the norm. It was a world where bandwidth and server-side storage space was much more precious. I know even back then, my university account had a fairly tiny quota. If I wanted to keep many emails past a few months, downloading them via POP was the only option. And if I was on any other terminal than a direct line in a computer lab, I was sure going to want to download my emails and read them offline.

The only reason Windows (or Mac, which has the same history with offline mail) comes into it is that back then private non-Windows/Mac machines were practically non-existant. One guy in my dorm had his own linux box, but that was certainly not the norm.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[thrillseeker]

Let me guess - you used to use a flame thrower to dry the cat.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[cHiphead]

I'm guessing is psuedo-spam for Exchange 2007. All they could possibly be talking about is the DEFAULT EMAIL QUOTA of 50MB being bumped to 2GB. The article is obviously a fluff piece, I have numerous clients running Ex2003 all of which have users with mailboxes around 2GB. And the clustering bit supposedly relieving the tape backup nightmare is utter bullshit when the client is required by law to keep offsite backups of all email. Giving all of the users 2GB on a hundred user exch server = 200GB = an extra 10 hours of backup to tape time (realworld performance on the average BackupExec 10d server).

Cheers.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

It was even better when my hard drive failed and I couldn't get to any of that mail until IT had the time to restore those PST files from backups.

Why are you storing your PST file on your desktop? You probably should relocate the PST file to a network share on a server that has a regular backup schedule, has RAID storage, and a plan in place to quickly restore should the server fail. Where I work, we rarely backup any of the workstations so only copies of any files ever exist on the client desktops. All data should exist on a network share or on original media (CD/DVD/tape/etc...). Any client system that crashes will be restored with a default image and any custom installations are installed on top of that. As for the problem between the settings for your desktop versus lab systems, the IT group should be able to script the login to the point that all the basic settings are initialized on new desktop logins upon login.

Jim

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

It is this kind of ignorance that give Microsoft MCSEs a bad rep. The 75GB limit increase came with SP2. How long has Exchange SP2 been out?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[advocate_one]

It is a shame that people have to resort of abusing email to store/share files.

well sourcesafe is next to useless at actually doing what it should be good at... holding the important files and emails for a project. It's crap and dangerously flaky when the database is larger than a few gig, not to mention the fact that your critical data gets locked into a proprietary format. I'd have us using CVS at my place of work if I had any say in the matter, but they're a stick in the mud microsoft only shop... if it doesn't have microsoft on the box, then it doesn't exist as far as they're concerned.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[niceone]

>>The summary is misleading, if not wholly inaccurate.

>This is slashdot.

Yes, please replace the words "if not" with "and intentionally" when you comment on the dupe.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[dave562]

If it's such a pain in the ass to recreate, how about you use some good old early 1990s tech and Ghost your drive? As for executing compiled apps on another machine.... hahahahaaaaa!!! Ya, that's a great idea.... once there is enough bandwidth.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[maynard]

Hold on, these draconian policies make a lot of sense from a capitalization standpoint. On the server side, the big bottleneck is data bandwidth between your mail spool disks and server RAM. Even assuming you run fiber channel RAID and get +200MB/sec sustained throughput, that's still much too small when you're dealing with multiple users who each have very large mailboxes. Think about it: forty 500MB spool files being loaded at once and you have gridlock across that disk bus. Remember, every IMAP connection performs a linear traversal of that spool file to extract new mail headers. That's the real problem, and it can't be solved with cheap commodity hardware.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[jafiwam]

It's even sort of dumber than that.

Anybody running Exchange 2007 probably has new boxes to run it on, and has had a chance to review storage size needs and can therefore, most likely increase mailbox sizes.

If you are on that version, and still have 50 MB size limits it's to prevent abuse by people who arguably shouldn't NEED that much to do their jobs. Take a hard look at the stuff the users are storing there and the big drive space volume comes from jokes (bitmap format, 4 megs each), PowerPoint presentations of more jokes, and other crap. A lot of real work can be done on very little space if you stick with plain text and don't fool around.

In other words, if a mailbox size limit on Exchange 2007 server is for any other reason than to keep the pleebs from abusing the email system you built the damn thing wrong. As part of a company with about 25 employees, our older exchange server has 800 gigs of space. We don't pay attention to size limits _at_all_ because we don't want to have to get in the way of individual style of using email. (Plus the pointy-hairs are packrats)

Though, I would caution that after a bit the ability to search through and organize it degrades fast...

Anybody that thinks Gmail / Exchange are in realistic competition is stupid. (Microsoft) Those two services may sound similar when you compare "features", but in the real world they really are not competitors.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[jonbryce]

Often you don't just need the attachment, which will be copied to the smb server, but a record of who it was received from and sent to; and a history of how the document developed as it went back and forth. I can't think of a better way of storing these than in an email box somewhere, especially as many email servers link to a CRM database so you can get a full history of all communications by client and by project.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[slamb]

Remember, every IMAP connection performs a linear traversal of that spool file to extract new mail headers. That's the real problem, and it can't be solved with cheap commodity hardware.

But it can be solved with cheap commodity software. This is why IMAP has had UIDs in the spec since at least RFC 2060. The only case I'm aware of in which the entire mailbox still must be traversed (flag synchronization) will be solved when RFC 4551 is implemented on both the client and server side.

If you're thinking of something else, could you please give details?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[merreborn]

- "Email is not a storage system" (dogma and hyperbole)

You want 40 people in your organization to view a 10 megabyte file. You can:
A) sent it to them as an email attachment, resulting in over 400 megabytes of disk usage on the mail server
B) use an appropriate network storage system, resulting in 10 megabytes of disk usage on the file server

Where's the dogma and hyperbole? Email is a dreadful means for sharing files.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[SparkEE]

Not sure why this is so funny. I've done this for years on Sun and Linux based networks. The only bandwidth used is to load the application from the server into RAM to run it. At my last company, everything ran on Red Hat, almost all data and applications were stored on the file server. The only thing the local disk was used for was the "cvslocal" directory and other "working" directories for disposable compile-time files used in simulations and synthesis.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[DigiShaman]

- "Email is not a storage system" (dogma and hyperbole)

You've GOT to be kidding, right? Seriously, your e-mail server shouldn't be a bloody file server. It should be for e-mail, and that's it.

It really burns me up when co-workers pass multiple revisions of a document back and fourth while keeping the old versions still in their inbox. Damn it!!! If you need to collaborate on an Excel or Word document, do it on the file server. If you need archived backups of previous revisions, keep them on the file server too.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Muffhead]

Not that I like people using email for file storage & transfer it's not that bad. Exchange does use a single instance store, so you only end up with one copy of the file in the database.

I found a user who emailled a 1 GB file a while back....

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[SparkEE]

Let me preface this by saying that I completely agree with everything you said; nonetheless the answers are:

Because that's what the IT people set the archiver up to do. And there isn't a network share available to do otherwise. There are very strict rules about what type of data can be where. If I tried to put my PST elsewhere, it would probably be removed and I get called down for a briefing.

I should have mentioned that they also use a backup system that actually backs up all the user desktops every night, which gives you a sense of safety when keeping data on you local drive. The problem is that when something goes wrong, you find out just how long it can take to restore that data.

As far as the scripting things, yeah they should be able to do that. Just like they should be able to give me a place to call home on the file servers. They simply don't, because that is not the Windows way.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[maynard]

Sure. Here's the relevant section of 2060 on unique identifiers:

Another instance in which unique identifiers are regenerated is if the message store has no mechanism to store unique identifiers. Although this specification recognizes that this may be unavoidable in certain server environments, it STRONGLY ENCOURAGES message store implementation techniques that avoid this problem.

I'm actually experiencing this problem on a Debian server running wuimapd and sslwrap. We're seeing tremendous performance problems once users' mailboxes grow beyond a few hundred megabytes, though no problems at all when users move mail into secondary folders. It's possible that UID support is borked though. I previously read through 2060, but I have to admit that I missed the relevance of UIDs to my particular problem. Perhaps you've just solved it. If so, thanks!

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[SparkEE]

When was POPing your message down to a local machine ever the norm? I thought the norm was to read your email via a terminal, with the email always on the server. That method made sense in the beginning and still does now. The only real problem is that mailbox quotas have not kept up with the growth in use and size of emails.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[dave562]

In the Microsoft world they accomplish that using terminal services, or Citrix if you're talking about supporting a lot of remote users. You don't even need to load the application onto your workstation. You just need the terminal services client.

The reason why I found it funny is because I thought of a client of mine that is running a waste management application. The morons who wrote the app (in Fujitsu COBOL .Net of all things) are opening 25+ simultaneous connections to 200+ MB data files that get copied down to the workstation every time a report needs to be run. That app has had many problems it wasn't even funny. We dropped in a Citrix box and all of a sudden the file errors that they were having went away. Of course the vendor refuses to acknowledge that their architecture doesn't scale properly beyond five users, but whatever... the client doesn't want to pay us to rewrite the app in something that will actually work in a networked environment.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[merreborn]

Exchange does use a single instance store, so you only end up with one copy of the file in the database.

Even then, you've got the folks that use email for version control, and mail the same file back and forth as they revise it.

I don't even admin an email system, so I'm definitely not the type to be dogmatic about this sort of thing. I just believe in using the right tool for the job. Email *can* be used for file sharing and version control, but it does an awfully poor job of both.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Philosinfinity]

Anybody that thinks Gmail / Exchange are in realistic competition is stupid. (Microsoft) Those two services may sound similar when you compare "features", but in the real world they really are not competitors.

I couldn't have said that better myself. However, I think that in the enterprise environment, the storage issues are addressed even when using existing hardware. For instance, our environment will be upgraded to Exchange 2007 by migrating the LUNs that hold our current storage to the new server and upgrading from there. At the same time, we have reached space issues already (when our E2K3 DB reached 1.5TB). We were very grateful to have out database volumes running from SAN, as we were easily able to create a metaLUN to increase the available space. If an enterprise environment is planned well, such as using SAN space for volumes that can easily fill up quickly, storage should rarely be an issue.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Wakko Warner]

zippocat?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Muffhead]

Oh I agree. But sometimes it's easier to let the users do silly things. Choose the battles you can win.

OT: I've finally stopped my users copying a 5 GB zip over a 2 Mb VPN link and then unzipping it. On their local PC. To the remote site.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[smbarbour]

No, she does not have a GMail account, and yes, they are ALL e-mails (she sends a lot of attachments to various places, all of which need to be kept).

There is also a process to relocate her archive PSTs when they approach 2GB (At which point Outlook breaks down, and the system goes to crap)

She does not yet have Google Desktop installed though, her local HDD isn't large enough to hold the index (10 GB drive, no budget to upgrade).

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[jamstar7]

2) My wife, who has worked at the company for a year and a half, has already racked up at LEAST 8GB in ARCHIVED e-mail.

Who'd wanna keep all those P3N15 3NL4RGM3NT ads???? Recycle those bits & electrons!!!

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[maynard]

Wait. UID support requires that I write my inbox spool files out in mbx format, right? I can't do that because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of other 'nix clients along with IMAP. Which is why I'm still using traditional sendmail appended spool files. Is this what you were talking about?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[james_shoemaker]

Ever think of moving from mbox to maildir? it solves the "one huge file/imap folder" issue.

James

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[maynard]

Nope. But only because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of 'nix clients, along with providing IMAP/SSL support to other clients. But yeah, I've hit a terrible bottleneck because of that. And NFS filelocking is crappy at best, a nightmare at worst. But you and the previous commenter really did pinpoint my bottleneck - and it's not the fault of imapd, but of the constraints inherent in my broken implementation.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[SparkEE]

My wife's company runs almost entirely based on a similar paradigm. They have a program written in Foxpro that run on the server and is used via Citrix at the workstation. It's painful as hell to watch it try to keep up with my wife when she's entering a pile of quotes into it. Pardon my likely ignorance here, I'm a hardware guy (EE), not a software one, but I have to ask this. Isn't Citrix just another form of Remote Desktop? You're not actually executing the program on the workstations, right? Back to my little story from before, bandwidth isn't even in that equation once I fill in the blanks. Turns out that my the boot sector of my disk is what failed. So, the IT guys put in a new disk and a fresh load of Windows. But, they kept the old disk in the machine as a secondary drive so I could pull my data off it. (Here's where my Window's ignorance shines through) I was baffled that I couldn't just copy stuff from the old "Program Files" folder into the new one and have it work. Instead I had to sit through countless installations of all my applications again. If windows was more "network-centric", then it wouldn't matter where data and applications lived. As long as the code is complied for your hardware and libraries (or not even libraries if it's static), that all that should matter. BTW: I know I've gone way off topic now, so my apologies to those who care.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Morethanone]

It's not that the summary is misleading, it's the "spin" put on it by Slashdot (shocker). I doubt half of the Eunuchs posting here even read the article. Yeah - I want to give the Communists at Google all my email.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[slamb]

Wait. UID support requires that I write my inbox spool files out in mbx format, right? I can't do that because I'm NFS exporting the mail spool to a bunch of other 'nix clients along with IMAP. Which is why I'm still using traditional sendmail appended spool files. Is this what you were talking about?

Yeah, that would do it. I don't use wuimapd, so I'm not familiar with mbx format, but the traditional appended message format is horrible:

• Inefficient - not only is there no standard place to put uidvalidity and uid information (and other clients couldn't be trusted to maintain the invariants if you came up with a nonstandard one), but there are no persistent indexes at all. I guess you could keep at least the byte offsets of each message cached externally with validity keyed by the mtime of the mail file, but it can't keep it locked for the whole session or no mail would be delivered. A single external access (whether by sendmail delivering a new message or by one of these NFS-based clients) would force it to recompute. It would just know that the file changed; it doesn't have any way of knowing if the only change was appending a new message.
• Unreliable - The only way in Unix to replace the middle of a file with a different-length segment (as when marking a message read or moving it between folders) is to write out the whole new file on the same filesystem then rename() it into place. Your over-NFS clients probably don't even have permission to create files anywhere on the same filesystem, so instead they just overwrite all data later in the file and ftruncate() to the correct new size. If there's a network outage while that operation is underway, the file will be corrupted. At best, there will be a chunk that's skipped or written twice. At worst, it will be a total jumble of old and new blocks - it can't put a fdatasync() barrier between each write because it'd be way too slow.

I use Cyrus IMAPd. It's a different approach - all the mail on the system is owned by user cyrus. It has its own quota system. Email is stored in basically maildir format (one file per message), but with extra Berkeley DB stuff in each directory (uidvalidity/uid, full-text search indexes, imap flags, etc.). The SMTP daemon (Postfix in my case) hands the mail off to it for delivery. You only access mail through IMAP.

It works well for me. My worst problem is that Mail.app will occasionally go into this slow "synchronization" procedure where it retrieves the flags of every message to see if they've changed - that's the situation RFC 4551 should fix.

I'd suggest getting rid of the NFS export. It's holding you back, and just about every client out there (even many text-based ones like Pine and mutt) speak IMAP. Even ones which don't support the UID stuff (like really old mutt versions) should be faster, since they can at least retrieve a single message later in the session without causing it to iterate through everything before. Not corrupting the mailbox should be a nice plus, too.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[maynard]

Yeah. mailbox over NFS is really a legacy thing at my lab. A lot of people like it because it's essentially a zero configuration solution for mail. Visitors and academic collaborators can just sit down, login, and type pine without having to configure their imap client.

But it's causing all sorts of other problems. So... you're spot on right. Anyway, mail over NFS is a security and locking nightmare. Just as you describe. Though I would argue that your complaint about mailbox corruption during a network outage is only true with soft mounts. Not that hard mounts make it a good idea though. :)

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[illegalcortex]

Well, I can speak for life in my university during the early-to-mid 90s. POPing was common for anyone with a person computer who had to dial in. It was also popular due to email quotas being very small. I worked networking tech support, so I fielded walk-up and phone calls to help people with it.

At that time, if you lived in a few dorms on campus, you could jockey for one of the half-dozen dumb terminals in your dorm. Other dorms simply didn't have them. Ethernet had not been installed outside of a very few (it took another 5 years or so for this to really turn around). Most who had their own PC and didn't want to tie up their phone line all the time (myself included), used POP.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[slamb]

Though I would argue that your complaint about mailbox corruption during a network outage is only true with soft mounts. Not that hard mounts make it a good idea though. :)

Hard mounts wouldn't help all cases. What if the outage is longer than soft fail time * retries? And is the file lock retained over soft mount failure? And what happens if either machine goes down during this time? Or if the client process crashes? These are all failures which can occur on even a single machine, and ones which a well-thought-out file format can solve, much like the write-ahead log does for ACID databases like Oracle or PostgreSQL. But the traditional appended messages is not such a format, and NFS makes the failures likely. Bad combination...

In any case, good luck with your mail setup. I sympathize...

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not work in IT. We're always dealing with corrupt PST files....

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[smbarbour]

I do work in IT. It has been our experience that when a PST file approaches 2 GB, it will become corrupt. Our remedy (that doesn't involve deleting archived items), is to start a new PST file for items to go into.

Our system works as follows:
Maintain a frequent AutoArchive schedule to keep the main PST file size under control
When the archive PST file reaches 1.5 GB, rename the file (and in some cases relocate it to a location with more storage space).
The absence of the archive PST triggers Outlook to create a new file.
Repeat as necessary.

Fortunately, there are few users that require this process.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[macdaddy]

Aren't PSTs limited to 2GB?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[macdaddy]

BTW, and I'm not arguing on the side of using email as a freaking file transfer protocol, but you can NFS mount volumes contains MailDir structures. That's the only way to actually share mail stores on *nix systems unless you stuff it into a DB. You absolutely can not under and circumstances do that with Berkley mbox spools. It looks like you already know that based on your flock statements but I just wanted to point that out again anyhow in case you didn't know about MailDir. Procmail supports MailDir natively.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[macdaddy]

Whoa whoa whoa. There's your problem. The entire mbox is read from disk for wuimapd to read and pass off the correct UIDs. You're not consuming a lot of network I/O (unless you're NFS mounting the mbox files which will ultimately destroy your mail spools, I guarantee it) but you're killing your disk I/O. BTW, Sendmail isn't a LDA. It doesn't write anything other than to disk other than queue files. Procmail is a LDA and is most likely the one you're using. It's what writes to you Berkley mbox spools. Procmail can also write to MailDir which is one of the fixes for your problem. .... I just realized that you're the guy I just replied to with another message. Oh well; I'm not rewriting that now. :-)

I would recommend switching to MailDir if your IMAP server supports it and strongly recommend looking into Cyrus-IMAPd. It's nice. You can also replicate it across the backend which is a very good thing.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

Standard Edition has a 75Gb limit (since SP2), but Enterprise Edition has "no" limit. (I say "no" in inverted commas because there is a limit, but your hardware will run out before that's reached)

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[BagOBones]

More than a Year that is for sure, but some of use where only able to implement it recently corporate wide because the High uptime front end needs to be update before the back end servers can be.

We have had several users running between 2 and 7GB mailboxes. There wasn't much problem with this as long as you don't have too many users in the same message store. Very few users use that much, most of our users keep their mailbox almost empty or in the .5 GB range.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[tacocat]

I'm not sure that it would be all that useful. Then again, I'm using dbmail and since it's just a database backend I can run mailboxes into the TB size.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[empaler]

I hate Google Desktop. Thank you for your constructive input and well-formulated opinion.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[dbIII]

To sum up:

Outlook not so good.

Alternatively recovering emails from an mbox format file can be done easily with any text editor. Having to spend an entire day to recovery a mailbox that had done nothing other than exceed 2GB in size (Outlook Express) with shareware since the MS tools could not do it was a waste of time. The current version of Exchange and the full version of Outlook is obviously better but the format is still a step backwards.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

the 50mb mailbox restriction is for exchange standard, if you have more than just a very small buisness, exchange standard is kinda limited as it doesn't allow you to have more than 16 gb of total storage and 50mb mailboxes. Exchange Enterprise has no restrictions on mailbox size which is what you probably are running. This is actually a really good thing for small buisnesses, because exchange licenses and redundancy can cost a pretty penny if your not ready for it.

Jay

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

Not today. Outlook 2003 supports a newer PST format that has full support for Unicode, and raises the total size to 20GB:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[swb]

You're being a little unfair to the IT department. "Too cheap to upgrade" implies that the capital dollars and approval is available, but not being spent in the name of thrift. "Email is not a storage system" can be a reasonable argument in environments where significant expense *has* been spent to provide substantive filesharing resources.

I worked someplace where we didn't cap email boxes AND couldn't get two nickels to rub together from finance due to the crappy business environment and meddling holding company (capital expenses over $10k had a Rube Goldberg approval process requiring no fewer than 17 approvals, 7 requiring actual printed form signatures).

It ended up being a disaster -- 350 people and an information store of 300GB. Lucky for me the array controller died and corrupted all 24 disks a month *after* I left. Fortunately I made sure that the CIO's lack of a backbone on policies AND finances were made clear to his boss and the head of HR before I left.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[swb]

The main problem with this is that as of Exchange 2003, MS will not provide assistance resolving mailbox issues for mailboxes > 2GB.

Is this documented at MS's site at all?

Please tell me it is, I have a couple of users I can't wait to buttfuck with this information. They can basically expect to either toss their precious, hoarded email or expect to be told "I told you so" when their mailbox is unusable. With some I might just delete half the email on principal, since there's really nothing they can complain about and nothing I can do if MS won't support it.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[transwarp]

The GP said Google Desktop, not specifically GMail. Google Desktop has no problem indexing Outlook's or (I think) Thunderbird's email.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

And exactly which text editor do you use to fix a corrupt 2GB mbox file? Seriously, what email program do you use that can even run in a usable fashion on a 2GB mbox file?

dom

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[mookie t mookle]

IIRC Exchange 2003 only stores one copy of an attachment anyway, saving spact.

That and the 75GB data store limit were the main reason we upgraded from Exchange 2000 in the first place.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[dbIII]

And exactly which text editor do you use to fix a corrupt 2GB mbox file?

Take your pick, there are dozens of capable editors - we're not talking MS Word here but text editors like vi, emacs, vim and so on. Most text editors are designed to work on files larger than available memory. I've done it with a 40GB tape image copied to disk on a machine with 2GB of memory - many others here will have done similar things.

Seriously, what email program do you use that can even run in a usable fashion on a 2GB mbox file?

Probably just about all of them but most definately Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird. There are a few people where I work that don't clean up their mail for years so there are a few with 2GB+ for a single mbox format file spread over those three mail clients. I'll bet Eudora and many more can do it as well. It's not as if it is hard for it to generate a summary containing the main parts of the headers and display that.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

The IT geeks always complain about this, and the non-IT people will always do it because it is the easiest way they have. It is not the job of everybody in the company to be up to date on the latest "computer junk". That is what all of us on Slashdot are for. We handle the computers, they handle the legal, financial, sales, administrative, etc tasks. That is why we designed 2007 to handle this. Move to Exchange/Outlook 2007 and you can *easily* create a sharepoint site (stored in Exchange) for a specific email thread. A link gets sent in the email instead of the attachment and your documents are automatically version controlled and available for all parties to edit. We (yes I do work for MS) even went beyond that, the sharepoint can be accessed from any location (OWA/OWA light) or any device that supports Active Sync. If someone posts a document in a format that isn't supported on the device you are accessing it from Exchange will automatically translate it into HTML and deliver that to you instead. No buttons to push. No settings to find. Just what 99% of the world wants. Remember, users haven't heard of CVS or Subversion. They don't care if their mail is stored in a DB or mbox or maildir. They don't care if we deliver it over fiber or wifi, or use semaphore flags. They just want it to be easy and not interupt their work and not require them to spend extra time/energy on a job they probably don't enjoy.
Find the rest of the features here.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[WuphonsReach]

While I agree with your sentiments... 800GB for 25 users sounds a bit overkill. (grin)

We're only allowing 4GB per user on the new server. But that's just a planning number, not a hard quota. Anyone who goes over 4GB in their maildir accounts will probably get a scripted weekly warning message. We have a few packrats and a few thrifties. I figure I'll continually adjust the warning message threshold to get looser and looser as time goes on.

(I may even pester the users via our internal Jabber server...)

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the IT guys put in a new disk and a fresh load of Windows. But, they kept the old disk in the machine as a secondary drive so I could pull my data off it. (Here's where my Window's ignorance shines through) I was baffled that I couldn't just copy stuff from the old "Program Files" folder into the new one and have it work. Instead I had to sit through countless installations of all my applications again. If windows was more "network-centric", then it wouldn't matter where data and applications lived. As long as the code is complied for your hardware and libraries (or not even libraries if it's static), that all that should matter.

That can be done, check out Altiris SVS. It makes app redeployment and movement a breeze. With it I'm able to carry all my apps around on a little usb drive. I've no idea what they charge actual paying customers, but the free personal version is pretty slick. http://juice.altiris.com/page/86/get-svs-here-now

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[dave562]

Isn't Citrix just another form of Remote Desktop?

To be technical, Remote Desktop is another form of Citrix. Microsoft licensed/stole the technology from Citrix. Gotta give credit where credit is due. =)

Turns out that my the boot sector of my disk is what failed. So, the IT guys put in a new disk and a fresh load of Windows. But, they kept the old disk in the machine as a secondary drive so I could pull my data off it. (Here's where my Window's ignorance shines through) I was baffled that I couldn't just copy stuff from the old "Program Files" folder into the new one and have it work. Instead I had to sit through countless installations of all my applications again.

I think that everyone who has used Windows has gone through a similar situation. You ran into the largest problem with the Windows architecture and the registry. Even though all of your application files were there, the OS didn't know what to do with them because the registry in the freshly loaded version of Windows didn't have all of the appropriate entries/configuration information that would tell it how to deal with the programs. Drive imaging programs like Ghost are so popular exactly because of how big of a PITA it is to reload all of the programs you use.

If windows was more "network-centric", then it wouldn't matter where data and applications lived. As long as the code is complied for your hardware and libraries (or not even libraries if it's static), that all that should matter.

I understand what you are saying. I'm sure that when you take a look back at the history of network computing, you can see the shifts from handling everything on the server, to handling it on the workstation, back to handling a lot of it on the server. There are some technologies that are available in Microsoft land like MSIs that are designed to ease the pain of application installation. However I don't really see those technologies ever competing with a true network file system like what you're used to in the Unix world.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Deideldorfer]

Just last week I was wondering why no one used something like postgresql as an email storage system. Thanks for the tip on http://www.dbmail.org/ , posts like this are the reason I read Slashdot.

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[misleb]

It is abuse because it causes a lot of problems in the process of getting the job done. Many domains refuse messages over a certain size because of hte problems... which causes more problems.

-matthew

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[james_shoemaker]

If the spool is available over IMAP, what reason is there to NFS export it?

Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today

[Anonymous Coward]

Single instance store per mail store. So if all your users are on the same mail store you are all set. This is not the case in medium and large organizations.

Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Realistic_Dragon]

We have an ~100mb limit so that *users do not use mailboxes to store vast quantities of data*. If you have 2gb of data, it should be on a shared server!

Personally I would like to see a system that kept attachments only for a week and then stripped messages to text only - those could be kept forever as a useful archive. But 8 copies of different and non config controlled bid spec documents? That's only going to cost you money and lots and lots of pain.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Peter Mork]

Personally I would like to see a system that kept attachments only for a week and then stripped messages to text only - those could be kept forever as a useful archive.

Our company moves all attachments older than about a month to an external archive. And we use Exchange Server and Outlook.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[mistralol]

Store the information locally in an offline pst file. I dont know anyone who has 2GB of "active" emails they are processing.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[korbin_dallas]

You know on the surface I agree with you. Big mailbox = people storing stuff forever.
And your method is completely useless where I work, where no ones msg is text, they are either
word docs, pdf docs or html links to the first 2.

Also in the corpse world, when I get "Meeting tomorrow at 9am" msg, 24bytes, which is
sent as a Word DOC (128kb), that word doc is chewing up space at orders of magnitudes
faster than plaintext.

And I get peoples weekly report word docs that are 1Mb. Wow, my MB can hold 40 msgs?

Sample Mail where I work: email -> worddoc -> html link -> pdf -> "Bob Dick has been promoted to VP of Brooms in Brazil. (more ra-ra words)".

I think something happened to all secretaries (er Admin Assistants) a few years ago.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[cinnamon colbert]

"Personally I would like to see a system that kept attachments only for a week and then stripped messages to text only "

remind me to recommend you to our competitors
Did you see Last night's episode of Bones on Fox ?
How do yo spell clueless geek Ans: "realistic dragon"

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Store the information locally in an offline pst file. I dont know anyone who has 2GB of "active" emails they are processing.

I do. My old VP had 15,000+ e-mails stored on the server so he could access them from anywhere.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Anonymous Coward]

here you go

http://software.emc.com/products/product_family/em ailxtender_family.htm/

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus Notes add-on "My Attachments" partially does this. Attachments expire after a week and are placed in a secure local cache of old attachments to still be availible but not on the servers.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[bcrowell]

We have an ~100mb limit so that *users do not use mailboxes to store vast quantities of data*. If you have 2gb of data, it should be on a shared server!
Aw, c'mon, there are many perfectly valid reasons for users to have 2 Gb in their mail folders. For instance, your company probably has a policy that workers shouldn't pornsurf on company time. So the typical user gets the memo about the new policy, and what's his obvious, reasonable reaction? "Yeah," he says to himself, "I really shouldn't be spending the whole afternoon at work clicking around on porn sites. That's inefficient. Instead, I'll write a web-scraper script that downloads all my porn automatically, puts it in a tarball, and sends it to me every day as an e-mail attachment." He's just trying to be considerate by not putting it on a shared server, where you'd have to back it up for him.

Personally I would like to see a system that kept attachments only for a week and then stripped messages to text only - those could be kept forever as a useful archive.
Aw, no way. Then his natural reaction would be to preserve all his old porn, by writing a cron job that goes through his mailbox once a week and sends a fresh copy of each porn archive back to himself.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[slamb]

We have an ~100mb limit so that *users do not use mailboxes to store vast quantities of data*. If you have 2gb of data, it should be on a shared server!

I'ts not just attachments - my personal email account holds over 500 megabytes of mostly text. (To be precise, the vast majority of emails are pure text; don't have numbers handy, but I think the majority of storage is taken up by text. Large emails or ones with Office attachments are rejected.) It also holds another couple gigs of spam/viruses I keep around for Bayesian filter training purposes.

Ideally in a corporate environment people put stuff (even text) on a wiki or into a repository, but it's good to be able to go back to old emails when something falls through the cracks. Why delete anything when I have the space?

Personally I would like to see a system that kept attachments only for a week and then stripped messages to text only - those could be kept forever as a useful archive. But 8 copies of different and non config controlled bid spec documents? That's only going to cost you money and lots and lots of pain.

I would prefer people didn't send those as email attachments at all; the alternative I discussed in a recent thread is superior. The only case it doesn't help with is revising documents with someone outside the company. Don't have a really good answer to that one, but email certainly sucks...

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Thauma]

There are two very good products for this... Zantaz's EAS and Symantec (previously Veritas') Enterprise Vault...

We keep a copy of every message that hits exchange on NetApp SATA bases SAN for compliance, and in the user's mailbox no attachment is more than 90 days old... If it is it gets stripped out and a shortcut to EV Vault seamlessly replaces it.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[MindStalker]

You do realize that his will be CONFIGURABLE. There is no reason MS should have to ask an IT department for a configurable option.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[AK Marc]

Store the information locally in an offline pst file.

If they are worth saving, they are worth backing up. A PST is the worst of all worlds. It encourages hoarding, and with immense PSTs, file corruption will eventually happen or a computer crash, then you have angry users asking for data they thought was backed up. Not to mention that on company that passes a lot of attachments back and forth will have shared attachments with an Exchange server, but separate coppies with PSTs. I've seen companies with a 20 GB mail database that decided to enforce archiving and saved it to network storage so it would be backed up, and it bacame about 100 GB when they split all the duplicate attachments. Rarely have I seen PST not be the single worst option for holding business emails.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Philosinfinity]

EMC, CommVault, CA, Quest, and many other vendors have email archiving solutions that do exactly this. Settings are customizable, and easily allow for a tiered storage approach that would fit the main idea you are looking at. However, 100MB limits on mailboxes are essentially impossible in many fields. Plus, can you imagine telling your company president, CEO, managing partner, or head of staff that they need to trim their mailbox because they are over 100MB? I know we tried to cap the mailboxes at 2GB in our firm under the pretense that MS would not directly support mailbox issues greater than that. It got up to our managing partners and was immediately shot back down. I know that email is not meant to be an archival solution, but realistically, it is becoming just that (both by users and from a legal perspective). In fact, many DMS solutions like Interwoven are merging interfaces into Outlook for that exact purpose.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[wenchmagnet]

Check out Lotus Notes and the plugin "My Attachments" - does exactly this and works very smoothly.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[vertinox]

We have an ~100mb limit so that *users do not use mailboxes to store vast quantities of data*. If you have 2gb of data, it should be on a shared server!

So you don't mind the fact that lazy users call you up that don't understand what "YOUR MAILBOX" is full message means or call screaming demand more information.

Or perhaps you've never had to deal with people who have put a message on a PST on a local folder and the hard drive crashes or they quit the company and someone else needs to get to that?

I'd rather give the bastards unlimited email space rather than have them call me IMO.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[jonadab]

The line between current/active email and archived email is extremely blurry, and going back and archiving the older stuff as a separate step would cost me several extra hours a week for no good purpose.

Yes, I have more than 2GB of email. Keeping it doesn't hurt anything. 5 or 6 GB of space (or whatever it's up to now) costs, to a first approximation, nothing, particularly compared to my time. And yes, I *do* refer back to something old from time to time, and I often don't know exactly how old it is when I go looking for it, but grep finds it anyway. Quickly. Of course, my mail is automatically sorted upon receipt via split methods and stored using the nnml backend; if you use woefully feature-impoverished software like Outlook your mileage may vary. You probably don't have an easy way to open a folder (that corresponds, say, to a low-traffic mailing list) and show the last 300 messages, for example, or an easy way to separately choose whether to show only marked and unread messages versus the read ones too. You probably don't have regular expression filters for sorting them into folders in the first place, either.

If large amounts of email are a problem, the real problem is that your software isn't cut out for the workout it's getting. I've played with Outlook briefly, and I consider it a toy mailreader suitable only for people who don't actually get that much mail. It doesn't correctly rewrap quoted text, doesn't correctly break-and-rewrap when replying in the middle of a paragraph, doesn't fold quoted matter, doesn't handle attachments in a safe and sane fashion, doesn't handle HTML mail in a safe and sane fashion, doesn't have proper macros, isn't properly scriptable, ...

I don't want to give the impression here that I'm rabidly anti-Microsoft. I consider Outlook to be hands-down the worst product Microsoft has ever kept on the market for more than two years running. (They've produced a few other odd bits of utter rubbish (what large company hasn't?), but stuff like Bob disappeared from the store shelves after a few months, and a company is allowed to make a mistake, after all, as long as they eventually figure out it's a mistake and repent of it.) I'm much more kindly disposed to Word, for instance.

So I'm not rabidly anti-Microsoft, so much as rabidly anti-Outlook.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[smash]

PSTs are not supported over network shares.

This means to be "supported" by microsoft, they need to be on the local PC.

Which means they don't get backed up.

If they *are* on a network share, good luck with the inevitable corruption issues that seem to occur, and the backup difficulties that go along with that.

PSTs are shit, seriously.

Re:Did they ask everyone's IT department first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus Notes is NOT an email client. It is a document based database. Years and years of pain have been inflicted on users by IT departments who foist Notes on them as an email client. It is easily one of the worst user interfaces ever devised by man.

Bullshit

[TheCabal]

Learn to read, submitter. The "piffling 50-MB limit" is a corporate policy. Exchange has supported multigigabyte mailboxes for a long time. MS is trying to get companies to limit mailbox quotas to prevent users from bypassing corporate policy and forward mail to Gmail.

Re:Bullshit

[LoudMusic]

Learn to read, submitter. The "piffling 50-MB limit" is a corporate policy. Exchange has supported multigigabyte mailboxes for a long time. MS is trying to get companies to limit mailbox quotas to prevent users from bypassing corporate policy and forward mail to Gmail. That's kind of what I was thinking. I administrate a Lotus Domino server and we'd been using 200MB for years. Recently I cranked everyone up to 2GB. There are only about 60 of us, but even so it's not outrageous to build a system that can maintain that. Mirror it internally in the server and then replicate it offsite somewhere. Also use a 'shared mail' database for any duplicate messages sent to multiple recipients. To take it another step you could configure the server to delete attachments that are more than X days old (I went with a few months if I remember correctly). We're currently using 50GB+ of storage space just in mail, which is about 1GB per user average. So even a 5,000 user system wouldn't be impossible to build.

Storage space is cheap. Buy lots of it.

Re:Bullshit

[rcw-home]

it's not outrageous to build a system that can maintain that. Mirror it internally in the server and then replicate it offsite somewhere.

It is outrageous if you have to back up Exchange. Exchange's backup API is based around doing full backups of the entire information store, then perhaps doing incremental backups of the transaction logs. You'd have to be insane to use the incremental backups - if you had to restore a week's worth of transaction logs, it could take a day or longer to play them all back. So instead, mail administrators keep the entire information store down to a size they can reliably do a full backup of daily. As for replication for Exchange, go ahead and price out the third-party software out there. You won't like what you see.

Storage space is cheap. Buy lots of it.

Fast, reliable storage space (usually RAID10 arrays of SCSI disks) still isn't. If you try and spread the disk throughput load across more machines, you spend a lot more money on Windows Server and Exchange Enterprise Edition licenses, and you may have to build out your server room a bit more too.

Currently the only way to get a reliable Exchange/Outlook setup with large mailboxes for a reasonable number of employees is to spend a lot more money than you thought you had to. That means companies are sticking with suboptimal setups, pissing off their employees, and that's the point the article is trying to address.

Re:Bullshit

[pembo13]

The thing is though, some "IT" people who manage these Exchange servers act as if 50MB is a tech limit instead of just a policy.

Re:Bullshit

[TheCabal]

Exchange administration and planning isn't rocket science. If you're running into capacity problems, then maybe you should fire your planning team. Small mailboxes is a control implemented by a company to make sure that the resources allocated for mail are appropriate. I have several Terabytes of SAN space for my user's home directories, and we still implement quotas. Is this a fault of Microsoft also? It certainly makes it harder for our users to try to store their collection of MP3s on our network.

Re:Bullshit

[Philosinfinity]

Definitely good points. Our problem is that the E2K3 DB for our main Exchange Server is a bit over 1.5TB. Backing that up to LTO2 has been quite a challenge on a nightly basis. Especially when it interferes with our offsite tape copy. We've balanced this out so far by performing full backups MWF and incremental backups TR. The real problem is the brick level full backups. With a maximum throughput of 10GB/h per stream (maximum 5 streams), this backup of 1.5TB runs from Friday evening to Monday evening. Obviously an email archival solution would bring this time down tremendously, but as you stated, there is a high cost associated with that.

Re:Bullshit

[rcw-home]

Exchange administration and planning isn't rocket science.

I wouldn't have made the comparison myself, but now that you have made it, let me make an analogy: NASA pulled off some absolutely incredible projects while their budgetary planning consisted of "Budget? BUDGET? We gotta beat the Russians!"

If your corporate priorities have drifted as far as the United States' priorities have since then, your budget planning team (read: your executives, good luck firing them) will probably similarly prioritize your mail system.

Re:Bullshit

[TheCabal]

Poor analogy, and it's incomplete. Planning an Exchange installation doesn't require $19 billion nor does it require an army of PhDs.

Dunno what companies you've worked for, but I've never worked for one where the C-level execs did any of the network design or capacity planning. Most of the ones I've worked for realize the importance of corporate email and make sure that they can get the funding we've asked for after we did all the design work.

Re:Bullshit

[LoudMusic]

Definitely good points. Our problem is that the E2K3 DB for our main Exchange Server is a bit over 1.5TB. Backing that up to LTO2 has been quite a challenge on a nightly basis. Especially when it interferes with our offsite tape copy. We've balanced this out so far by performing full backups MWF and incremental backups TR. The real problem is the brick level full backups. With a maximum throughput of 10GB/h per stream (maximum 5 streams), this backup of 1.5TB runs from Friday evening to Monday evening. Obviously an email archival solution would bring this time down tremendously, but as you stated, there is a high cost associated with that. With my mail I just use the built in replication on a 10 minute cycle to an external server. I could drop that to half hour or something, I suppose. The delay there allows users to read and delete the majority of mail before it gets copied offsite. Obviously depending on the amount of data and the size of your internet connections this solution varies in acceptability, but for my uses it's far better than tape solutions. It cost me a hard drive and an old server, and some configuration time. And I just put the server at my boss's house on his 3mbit home connection - significantly faster than our office's outbound.

We do the same thing with the file servers and a nice batch script scheduled to run every 12 hours. Again, the hard drive and old server are much cheaper than any tape solution. But for the file servers I have it make an onsite copy before it then copies it offsite. That way the files aren't 'in use' on the primary server for very long.

I don't *think* so

[OhHellWithIt]

With that other post today about the U.S. government making the argument that they don't need a search warrant to read my mail on an ISP's server, I don't think I want my mail hanging around out there any longer than it takes to pull it down via POP. This is in addition to the worries one might have about proprietary information being accessible to potential competitors.

Re:I don't *think* so

[mark99]

Better think again.

SOX requires your company to keep it around for something like 7 years, so deleting it out of your mailbox only denies *you* access to it.

Re:I don't *think* so

[jfmiller]

Right! But also a good reason to push for the adoption of encrypted e-mail. Who knows what your ISP's data retention practices are.

JFMILLER

Re:I don't *think* so

[Chang]

Do you have a link to the SOX legislation or regulation that spells out this 7 year requirement?

This sounds completely made up to me.

Re:I don't *think* so

[OhHellWithIt]

That's a good point. My concern, though, is this business of the government thinking it doesn't need a warrant to get at my data stored on someone else's server. If it's on my premises, then at least they have to get a warrant.

I think the real solution is legislation or court rulings that accord your data stored on the ISP's server the same protections your physical possessions have in rented storage.

Re:I don't *think* so

[mark99]

I googled quickly before I posted and found the seven years. Now I can't find that link, but there are like 300k+ to sift through if you look for "sox e-mail retention".

Here is a link indicating 3 years is already standard practice in some industries (like mine).

      http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/com pliance/0,3800003180,39130615,00.htm

So it is not completely made up, though you could make a case for exageration :).

2GB?

[nagora]

Have MS's programmers still not worked out that file size is an UNSIGNED Int?

Re:2GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they were using Java.

Re:2GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

microsoft programmers, using java? Clearly you dont understand just how much microsofts management hates java :) Heck, in c# - their 'java clone but better' attempt, msdn refuses to even mention the word java despite the clear similarities between the languages

Re:2GB?

[kosmosik]

They did! They just keep it secret before they patent it. Otherwise some Linux guys would steal MS innovation!

Re:2GB?

[WilliamSChips]

"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"

Including the part where the people at the bus stop are just as accurate as the library, and yet know things the library doesn't know?

Re:2GB?

[nagora]

Including the part where the people at the bus stop are just as accurate as the library, and yet know things the library doesn't know?

And, of course, the part where you come back to the bus top the next day and get different answers.

You clearly have no idea of what a library (or an encyclopedia) is or does. Just like everyone who thinks wikipedia is a reliable reference source.

Re:2GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a joke because Java doesn't have unsigned types. I guess Gosling was thinking: "signed types should be enough for anybody".

Re:2GB?

[WilliamSChips]

Oh my god, look, in the sky! Now show me where that exists in Britannica. Oh wait, if there's an error in Britannica it takes a year to get that fixed.

Re:2GB?

[nagora]

Oh wait, if there's an error in Britannica it takes a year to get that fixed.

Yes, and the error won't then come back the day. Correct information in a book tends to stay in the following editions while errors tend to be removed. Neither is true of the shambolic mess of unattributed assertions that is Wikipedia.

Re:2GB?

[WilliamSChips]

Sorry, nope, incorrect information rarely comes back in Wikipedia as well as the editors are very vigilant. Although I guess you only believe something if it comes from Big People with Lots of Money.
A more accurate metaphor would be "Wikipedia is to Britannica as the internet is to a high school library"

Re:2GB?

[nagora]

Sorry, nope, incorrect information rarely comes back in Wikipedia

LOL.

Good initiative, poor judgement

[silentounce]

It's not the mailbox size that is causing people to use Gmail. It's the features. Gmail is simple and useful. It takes a lot more training and digging through menus to accomplish similar tasks in Gmail. The search feature is universal and reliable. If I need to find all emails related to a specific project it will take about 5 seconds in Gmail. In Outlook it would take at least 10 times that. The use of filters, labels, etc is far superior to similar functions in Outlook. They need to look beyond storage space. I'd still use Gmail even if it supplied far less storage space. In my opinion, Outlook is overkill. I doubt that many of its features are used by more than 75% of users.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[silentounce]

After reading my post again that last line is confusing. Revision to last sentence: what I meant was that less than 25% of users use anything beyound Outlook's basic features. Oh, and 83% of statistics are made up.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[just_another_sean]

Agreed. GMail could significantly lower my quota and I'd still love it. I currently am using 73 MB of my 2 GB of storage on GMail. And I was a fairly early adopter...

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[Randolpho]

I was about to post almost exactly the same thing when I stumbled on your post. So, mods, pay attention: mod parent +1, Insightful.

I personally couldn't care less how much space I get on GMail; I love GMail for one very simple reason: conversations. There isn't a single mail program out there that has a feature that compares to it. Lumping all emails on a single topic together as in a single interactive page is the best way to retain context on an email thread. Instead of seventeen "re: Bob, have you seen this yet?" emails in my inbox, I have one conversation.

It's features like that that make me wish I could use GMail all the time, not storage space.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[blugu64]

" Oh, and 83% of statistics are made up."

That's the '05 Number, it was 87% in '06, and projected to break 90% in '07.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[giorgiofr]

There isn't a single mail program out there that has a feature that compares to it.

/me opens Opera, F4, Inbox, Show as -> Threaded.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[PermanentMarker]

Wll gmail is nice until you notice you have yahoo friends. Then it seams gmail often acts as a mail blackhol, doesnt even send a NDR back. it looses mail. happens often with nested emails

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[Randolpho]

Not nearly the same.

With Opera, those seventeen (to continue with my previous, totally arbitrary number) emails in a threaded view still take up seventeen lines in my inbox. With GMail, they're collapsed together as a single conversation, a single line in my inbox. Yeah, that's much better.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[Keeper]

No, it is annoying as hell, especially when senders copy the previous mail in the reply.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[giorgiofr]

No, they don't, you have to click the small arrow to expand the thread. Otherwise they only take up one line. I've just tried it, because I don't like the threaded view so I didn't remember well how it worked. I'm using 9.02 though, it's not the latest version.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[Randolpho]

Good point. I forgot that threaded views tend to be collapsible. Still, can I view the entire thread in a single page/flat view the way I can with a GMail conversation?

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[fermion]

Outlook as a client is a real problem. In standard MS fashion, they put more effort into allowing the user to send pretty emails than they put into the utilitarian features.

The unfortunate thing is this is yet another instance of MS not serving the needs of it's customer. If there is one thing enterprise needs is a secure email system that is flexible enough to keep the employees from running to outside sources. The last thing I would if I ran a firm was for my employees to put all my trade secrets on gmail, where they might be indexed for all the world to see. An individual making a personal choice to trade privacy for email is one thing, but an individual should not have that luxury with corporate data.

Unfortunately, if one is going to get work done, one cannot rely on Outlook or any MS product. I myself am guilty on conducting certain matters on my personal account, simply because MS choses to set up the default mail client to IE only. Even though Yahoo, gmail, even MSN works perfectly on any browser, exchange server, at least in our configuration, does not. And ultimately, if you tell people to do the job or they will be fired, and you do not give them the proper tools, then they will certainly find other means to not get fired.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[giorgiofr]

No, you cannot do it exactly that way. Not with the text of all messages, like you do in Gmail. It's not a problem for me because I like long, old style lists of emails with the previous exchanges quoted in them :). But if you really like the feature you describe, Opera cannot help you, I'm afraid. Sometimes *even* Opera does not do what you want - a rare occurrance but nonetheless possible :D

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[WilliamSChips]

I've seen it more often that Yahoo's the one which loses mail.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[Elwood P Dowd]

Gmail deals with this flawlessly. If there is a large chunk of quoted text, it's collapsed. It doesn't even matter if people are top or bottom posters, because Gmail shows you exactly the text you should read in the order you should read it, based on who sent it & when.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[Keeper]

Apparently it doesn't work as flawlessly as you think, because it takes me 5 minutes to find the friggin response I'm trying to read. If I could find an option to turn the damn thing off I'd use it.

Re:Good initiative, poor judgement

[awful]

Yes exactly. When I compare my Lotus Notes inbox and folders to Gmail's conversation view I could cry in frustration. Trying to find mail in Notes is an exercise in banging your head into a wall, over and over again. Why other mail apps haven't cottoned on to conversation view I'll never know.

finally!

[Speare]

Finally, there won't be any more error messages when Joe CEO sends that funny PowerPoint with the Aflack duck stealing money out of the lady's purse, the photo of the lady's car precariously "parked" between the marina and a yacht, and a movie clip copy of the FedEx caveman commercial. Isn't progress wonderful?

Re:finally!

[gregleimbeck]

Actually, it's Geico that has the caveman commercials.

Re:finally!

[pkulak]

And don't forget that it's always going to be sent to the entire staff, that way all that glorious base64 text bloat gets copied a couple hundred times.

Re:finally!

[AK Marc]

It's probably a reference to the commercial about the caveman that got fired for not using FedEx. It's supposedly funny because he gets killed by a dinosaur. Geico doesn't have a trademark on cavemen.

That happens when you deal with outside companies.

[khasim]

But 8 copies of different and non config controlled bid spec documents?

Oh yeah! Particularly if you're dealing with an outside company. There's no way for your system to control their documents without your user manually copying the new document into your system.

And users will ALWAYS do what is easiest for them at that moment. No matter what it breaks.

Disk space is cheap.

What is needed is a way to setup annual archives and get the 8 year old data out of the current databases ... but still have them available for searching and such.

Up yers MS

[MillionthMonkey]

I forgot to check my hotmail account for a few months and you guys deleted all 10 MB of my emails. I lost touch with a bunch of people.

Re:Up yers MS

[Joebert]

How ?
Did you loose your contact list as well as the emails ?
Did they truncate your contacts list to people you've had contact with in the last year ?

Sorry, I'm just not sure how having your mailbox truncated to 10mb would cause you to loose contact with a bunch of people.

Re:Up yers MS

[MillionthMonkey]

Actually probably not; I'll have to check. I stopped logging into that thing once they deleted all the mail, which is what really pisses me off.

Re:Up yers MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually probably not; I'll have to check. I stopped logging into that thing once they deleted all the mail, which is what really pisses me off.

are you sure the reason wasn't just Steve Irwin's thumb stuck up your ass and going 'Oh yeah! That really pissed him off!!'

Re:Up yers MS

[WrongMonkey]

you should ask for your money back

Re:Up yers MS

[Anonymous Coward]

How much contact could you have lost with them if you didn't check your email for months?

Do you need 2Gigs for company email?

[Thansal]

I use gmail because I like it as a webmail client, nothing else (I don't care howmuch space I have, as I will never fill it). How much mail could you possibly NEED to store in a company email account? If you/your employies need more then what you are giving them, then you sohuld have given it to them (or come up with a better soloution) a long time ago, not wait for MS to implement remote backup in Exchange.

That and you should NOT have let them foward their email inthe firstplace (just disable the friken ability, it isn't that hard).

Re:Do you need 2Gigs for company email?

[jomama717]

I use gmail for free network backup every now and then, I have local backup but if the shit were to really hit the fan it would be nice to know that a select few of my files are safe on google's server farm. Another poor man's network backup story I've heard is that some of the online photo album sites will accept uuencoded data as pictures, and for a small fee allow much greater space than 2GB.

And how long

[Gonoff]

is it going to take me to fix a corrupt exchange database WHEN one of these goes corrupt?

The length of time it takes already makes it a toss up between restoring last nights backup and having things offline while it repairs itself...

And before anyone asks, yes I do have it split up.

Re:And how long

[exKingZog]

Oh c'mon, you LOVE sitting there watching ESEUTIL's little defrag counter not move for four hours...

. . . .

Gmail already has mail on the mobile

[CormacJ]

http://www.google.com/mobile/gmail/ has been around for a while now. It supports most types of mobile devices.

Why do I get a feeling that the Microsoft version will only support Windows CE devices?

Re:Gmail already has mail on the mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

Precognition? :-)

Re:Gmail already has mail on the mobile

[MSFanBoi2]

Um, Exchange has supported this since Exchange 2003 SP1 was released almost 2 years ago as well...

Re:Gmail already has mail on the mobile

[blowhole]

The Exchange ActiveSync protocol can be licensed from Microsoft. Nokia Intellisync is one such third party implementation.

Re:Gmail already has mail on the mobile

[knuxed]

I say bull??Exchange supports push email for mobiles as long as you have the Mail4Exchange App.Works exactly like a blackberry without all the costs.Best part is you can get the service for free from mail2web.com.Hence,just forward all ur mail to this and u have free push email

Re:Gmail already has mail on the mobile

[jamshid]

Yeah, like Google Maps for Mobile, Mobile GMail is a really great mobile (j2me/JavaME) app. Very fast, even over a (relatively) slow mobile Internet connection, and very easy to use even with mobile's limited interface.

Wow - how inovative

[woodyanderson]

Replicated and clustered mail stores for large mailboxes - something Lotus Notes has had for almost a decade. Maybe Ray Ozzie IS making a difference.

Re:Wow - how inovative

[operagost]

Too bad no one is able to actually use Notes.

Re:Wow - how inovative

[LibertineR]

Ray baby! How you likin that Seattle weather?

Re:Wow - how inovative

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose I could throw some forms on any database and call it an email client.

Re:Wow - how inovative

[Anonymous Coward]

apart from countless millions of people around the world.

and handling multi-gigabyte size mailfiles is simple in Notes. once again ms plays catchup.

kind of missing the point

[otacon]

the point isn't the 2 gb mailboxes. it's the fact that you don't have to have a server staff to maintain your exchange server and backups, people use gmail because it's easy and accessible....oh yeah and it's free...

You can tell this has nothing to do with reality

[jimicus]

Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape

So you either need a nice fast link to another site (fast enough to handle all the replication) or you need to accept that in the event of a disaster, you've lost your email system permanently.

Assuming you have such a link, you have to hope that nobody ever gets disgruntled, or your nice shiny replica will merrily replicate all the deleting they do.

This is misleading to say the least

[joeytmann]

Mailbox size in Exchange is pretty much unlimited(I wouldn't recommend it as your backup/restore times could be really long). PST max file size has been 2GB for the longest time. I wonder if the orginal poster meant Outlook 2007 instead of Exchange 2007? Outlook 2007, IIRC, has a pst file size limit of 4GB. Why anyone would need that amount of storage for email is beyond me.

Re:This is misleading to say the least

[Muffhead]

The pst limit in Outlook 2003 is somewhere near 20 GB. Does get a bit chunky though.

Re:This is misleading to say the least

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the article submitter is an idiot and didn't RTFA. This isn't about Microsoft's software at all - Exchange and Outlook handle 2GB mailboxes without missing a beat! It's merely a policy change by Microsoft's corporate IT department affecting only Microsoft's employees, not a change or limitation to any microsoft product.

(In other words, this is about Microsoft the COMPANY, not Microsoft's Software products. Their corporate IT dept used to have a limit of 50 MB per mailbox, and now they don't.)

The Real Problem

[mistralol]

The real problem exchange actually has is that fact its so awkward to backup or restore from backup.
Mayby microsoft should solve some valid issues first in stead of ones thats the person who runs the exchange server call already solve.

You should have a look at the methods required to resotre an single email box from a tape backup. You need at least 1 set of the same hardware todo it the "microsoft procedure way" all 72 steps of it and it takes around 2 days to complete.

Really exchange is a joke. When things go wrong it spits out nothing useful and spits out errors all the time when its running correctly.

All in all end users whine if their email quota is to small but others will whine because its slow . You get whine if you do and whine if you dont.

Re:The Real Problem

[joeytmann]

In exchange 2000 and previous verions, you are correct. It was a pain in the butt to restore an individual mailbox. But with proper planning and setup of policies you should NEVER have to restore an individual mailbox. Now I know what you are going to say, but what if a user deletes some message then emtpy's their deleted items folder. Well, use Recover Deleted items. You can set the retention in Exchange admin for as long as you want, most other exhcange admin I have talked to use somewhere between 30-45 days. In Exchange 2003, its made a bit easier with Recovery Storage Groups. You can restore a mailbox store to the RSG then use the exmerge util( was a PSS only util for a long time until Exchange 2003 came out then MS included it) to get the mailbox out, then merge it back in to the production mailbox, but again you really shouldn't have to do this. Exchange DB backups are only there for if the store corrupts of the volume the store is on dies.

Re:The Real Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this hasn't been true since Exchange 2000. In 2003, you have Recovery Storage Groups that allows you to restore a store without the need of another server. Of course, this assumes that the deleted mailbox has expired passed the number of days Exchange is set to keep deleted items. Otherwise, you can just run the cleanup agent, and reconnect the mailbox.

Re:The Real Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could use a real backup program like Backup Exec or Arcserve that allow you restore a mailbox to the original mailbox or a different mailbox. I have worked for some pretty cheap companies over the last ten years, but all of them have had one of those two programs and paid for the exchange agent to allow easy individual mailbox restore.

Re:The Real Problem

[MSFanBoi2]

Have you even touched Exchange since 5.5?

By this post, it really doesn't seem so.

Re:The Real Problem

[mandelbr0t]

Indeed. A single binary file comprising one or more mailboxes that can't be easily diff'ed to make incremental backups sounds like a huge problem. And the Microsoft fanboi comment about "never having to restore a single mailbox" is just stupid. How can something be so poorly designed? Every other mail server I've used supports the Maildir format, which stores every *message* in it's own file. It's easy to diff these directories and make proper incremental backups. I don't have to make stupid procedures that malign restoring a single mailbox as "wrong", because I just can.

mandelbr0t

Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada

[LibertineR]

I know its going to come up, from those of you who cant figure out how to restore your Exchange mailboxes, and with the 2G thing it becomes even more important.

First, keep your transaction logs on a separate disk array. If you dont, FORGET reliably restoring your mailboxes.

Second, make sure you use the VSS (Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service) when backing up your mailboxes.

The number one issue I see when called in to fix these messes, is Exchange Admins keeping the Transaction logs and the database on the same hardware, as though you could lose one without losing the other.

Restoring Exchange is hard, but it CAN BE DONE, bitches!

Re:Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada

[gerikson]

Before I started at my current workplace, the Exchange server was "administered" by a couple of Linux geeks. This was in the early years of the century, when you had to do stuff on the cheap or go out of business. Basically the soi-disant admins were members of the devel team.

Like many small companies, the office server was one box running Exchange, file services etc. So they ran low on disk space, and the 2 guys logged in and saw a whole slew of files ending with .log, with text file icons.

Hey, they said, that must be something we can remove. So they did.

Then Exchange didn't work. The expensive consultant couldn't do anything (backups? what backups?). It was like taking a rather large icepick and performing a crude lobotomy on the poor machine.

They went with Cyrus IMAP after that :)

Then we were acquired, and are on Exchange again. But at least the admins are competent now.

Re:Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada

[Anonymous Coward]

First, keep your transaction logs on a separate disk array. If you dont, FORGET reliably restoring your mailboxes.

Why? I've had disks in an array go bad, but never a whole array. And even multiple arrays don't protect you from all problems - that's what tape is for.

Restoring Exchange is hard, but it CAN BE DONE, bitches!

I think that speaks volumes about bad design choices.

Re:Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada

[LibertineR]

Ever lose a RAID controller? You have not lived until you experience that kind of pain.

Re:Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada

[anominous]

Ah, back in the day - I had a Mylex Dac960 fail - primary raid controller for main DB at the time......Painful? nope - swap it for a new one (pilfered from a spare machine), tell it to rebuild from COD (Configuration on Disk - - each of the disks in the array kept a copy of the Controllers config) - - back up and running in 30 mins :D ....sorry, off topic. R

Exchange Server storage

[Anonymous Coward]

50MB mailboxes is a suggested corporate policy, not a limitation of Exchange storage...
Exchange Server stores e-mail in a database file, using the ESE storage engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_E ngine). The maximum size of each file is 32TB and Exchange 2007 supports up to 50 files per server, theoretically allowing 1.6 petabytes per server. The way that the data is stored in the database file (single-item storage) makes restoring a single mailbox very hard -- it would be equivalent to running a query against a database stored on tape. Outlook uses the PST/OST file on the client. That is a much less advanced storage system and has a 2GB limit (or something like that).
The *realistic* size of Exchange Server database files is limited by the ability to backup/restore the files in a reasonable amount of time. A 32TB file isn't terribly useful if it takes weeks to backup/restore. The new clustered replication features in Exchange 2007 are _supposed_ to reduce the chance that a database file will have to be restored so larger files can be supported with the same SLA. Previous versions of Exchange did support clustering, but the data was shared between the two sides of the cluster.

Lawyers, See "Kill all the"

[Detritus]

Many people are stuck with user-hostile Exchange accounts due to fear of litigation. Companies impose rules like deleting all mail older than 30 days and not allowing the users to backup their email.

Re:Lawyers, See "Kill all the"

[slamb]

Many people are stuck with user-hostile Exchange accounts due to fear of litigation. Companies impose rules like deleting all mail older than 30 days and not allowing the users to backup their email.

I think the lawyers are just a convenient scapegoat. As I understand it, they got mad at corporations for saying "we don't have that on our server" when asked for something old but damaging but the user being able to produce it from a .pst file when it's helpful. So the lawyers said you'd better always produce everything you have.

Consequently, companies that don't want to deal with digging through .pst files (can't blame them) disallowed user backups. But here's where the problem lies - they didn't increase the mailbox sizes at the same time. They kept the draconian limits, either because of technical limitations (eased by this new Exchange version) or because they have skeletons in their server closet and don't want anyone to see them...

Re:Lawyers, See "Kill all the"

[WilliamSChips]

You do realize that line was actually said by a bad guy in the original play, right?

Re:Lawyers, See "Kill all the"

[Detritus]

Yes, but his heart was in the right place.

Re:Lawyers, See "Kill all the"

[WilliamSChips]

He was the henchman for a tyrant.

or switch to Lotus Domino where 2GB is small

[dominux]

mail file size used to be limited to 64GB on Domino, the limit has since been lifted. I haven't seen a monster like that in the wild, however 2GB is nothing special. Exchange sites often have restrictive quotas, Domino does have quotas available as a feature, but not so many people use them. Disk space is about the cheapest commodity a company can purchase (ok, so backup time and tape may be more of an issue) so why should companies get their employees to spend their expensive time trying to save a few gig of disk space? I think the architectural problems of Exchange mean that it does not really scale. As I understand it all the mail is in one big shared file rather than independent per user files which can be backed up/restored/compacted/fixed as individuals without screwing up other people's mail.

Competition

[dattaway]

I'm guessing there are very few or no patents covering this, explaining why competition is very fierce. Customers win big.

Re:Use ELM

[Archangel Michael]

Actually, I find you all of the above. Insightful, troll, flamebait. I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.

Email is, at its most basic form, text. However there are times when formatting an email is useful (1). Sticking a pretty 100k graphic as a background image is NOT USEFUL(2). But because 1 often leads to 2 because and because some people think that 2 is useful, we are beyond VT100 and ELM or PINE.

So, while I agree with your sentiments, the reality is you can never go back. It is both a waste of time and energy complaining. Time to move along, to something more useful. How about a nice game of Global Thermo Nuclear Jihad?

Replication != Backup

[good soldier svejk]

Unless this server to server replication includes some kind of iterative snapshotting you will still need to do backups. The main reason to do backups is not to recover servers or applications but to roll back eroneous changes. In the case of mail, most restores are of accidentally deleted mail. On Exchange this typically (barring a third party solution) also means the whole mailbox. So larger mailboxes mean longer restores. If this "replication does do snapshotting, and better yet allow for brick level restores, then maybe you can remove Exchange from your regular backup system. Otherwise, business as usual.

Re:Replication != Backup

[Muffhead]

I haven't had time to look at Exchange 2007, but I'd guess they're planning on using VSS more. That would give you the snapshots. But I also like to have things on tape anyways, just in case & somewhere else.

Re:Replication != Backup

[good soldier svejk]

I hate having anything on tape. I prefer capacity optimized disk with offsite replication. Tape sucks.

Re:Replication != Backup

[Muffhead]

Oh it's replicated offsite. The tapes are archival & last resort. I never touch them anymore, but it's nice to know they're there. I still like having an off line copy somewhere. Though there's some great disk based systems.

Thanks for the link.

Re:Replication != Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

First there is a dumpster that keeps everything that has been deleted for 14 days by default.

Second there is mailbox retention, so deleted mailboxes are kept until a full backup has been run.

Third there is Recovery Storage Groups which let you restore to a "virtual" storage group and merge individual mailboxes or items or whatever back to the live system, kind of like a brick level backup without having to do a brick level backup.

Forwarding

[extern_void]

I forward my hard drives from Windows to Linux very often too :)

More Reactive Fantabulousness

[Trails]

After IE 7 introduced tabs, anti-aliased text and PNG transparency, it looks like MS is again bringing up the rear.

For a company who got to where it was through innovation (yes, MS got to the dominant market position through innovation. The anti-competitve stuff came later), this constant stream of "Hey, yeah Google/Mozilla/ Apache/etc... That IS a good idea!" does not bode well for MS.

More disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Better ask for more disk and faster tape drives now. Or better yet upgrade to a SAN, a large SAN.

Re:Use ELM

[nutznboltz2003]

That's why I'd use Pine mail still, if it was an option where I work.

--nutz

Backup/Restore feature, not GMail

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked on Exchange for nearly a decade, I can tell you that no one was thinking "Gee, lets compete with GMail by making database maintainence easier". That said, who knows how marketing spins things once it gets in their hands.

The feature described is actually to solve the problems Admins have had with the time it takes to do full backups of large MDB's. As end users have demanded larger e-mailboxes, the size of the MDB's have grown. Since these are typically taken offline during off peak hours for full backups, this increase in size has forced either constraints on mailbox size or limited the number of mailboxes per MDB.

So much for evil nevarious plans to take down GMail (other than the kooky ideas marketing comes up with). :P

Re:Backup/Restore feature, not GMail

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had mod points, you would be +1, Informative.

Isn't it obvious? (was:2GB?)

[Lead Butthead]

Have MS's programmers still not worked out that file size is an UNSIGNED Int?

Evidently they have, since 8GB is outside the range of an unsigned int (typically a 32bit quantity) It's more likely to be an unsigned long long (64bit quantity) or for the .NET 2002 people, unsigned __int64.

And coming up next...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the story about Joe GS-Level Officeworker and how his classified email was on his stolen cellphone. Film at 11.

Wrong again, Thanks for the FUD

[east coast]

the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now.

It can already do this. MS is suggesting that companies increase the limits put on users to avoid risky (and potentially illegal) mail dumping to a GMail account.

Slashdot: Now with more FUD!

Aside from this there is also the option of personal folders using Outlook. Much more secure than GMail or any other 3rd party mail servers.

I don't do this, but:

[93 Escort Wagon]

I prefer using IMAP mailboxes/folders for all my mail; but I know a lot of people who do this. I think it's obvious MS doesn't "get it", though. It's got nothing to do with storage (even older versions of Exchange let you specify larger quotas, so it's just a matter of having enough bulk storage available). Many, if not most, people seem to prefer using Gmail's interface. And what's funny is some of these people prefer any web mail interface to using a separate mail program. We've got a lot of users that routinely use Webpine for access to their campus mail, and that beast is a crock of [insert perjorative here].

Wrong killer app

[PermanentMarker]

You have seen the wrong side, the real killer app in ex2007 is voice integration. And i mean voice.. In Exchange 2007 you can call with your mobile and it will speak out your email or you can say something like "i'm 10 to 20 minutes late for my next appointment". Then it understands this and automaticaly updates all other who where in this appointment. It's not like "press 1 for agenda, press 2 for mailbox, pres 3 for options... No its much much smarter then the average automatic telphone centre. You can even record a voice message and send it it others. And the voices are quite good te even when not english other languages ('i 've heard Dutch, amazed be such a clear voice). I would say Exchange 2007 is a (again) a killer app from MS. Like it was before the most powerfull mail system. Gmail ofcourse is fun, however wait till you mail your yahoo friend or visa verse. Google has a mailsystem (based on what???) wich often cannot mail to yahoo because the nailed their product i gues to much with html styles. Otherwise i cannot explain why mailing between yahoo and google so often goes wrong especialy with deep threads. Ofcourse the people who now how protocols behave (MS) had never had such problems. Yeah i dare to say that since it began including x400 in ex5.0 (wich soon went to 55) In those days it replaced expensive x400 switches could connect to x400 clouds And these days it will sip i say i'm amazed again.

Google mail sucks...

[PermanentMarker]

Yeah it realy does as a mail system.
Why ?
Ever tried to mail dep nested mails between yahoo an gmail ?
Often such mail does not arrive, you dont even get a NDR (call that a mail system???).
Gmail is its own blackhole mail system.

Compared to MS, they are not even near to EX2000 owa.
And how about a mail system to wich you can talk trough your mobile..
Well that is the killer app in Exchange 2007, it can listen to you.
Not like pres 1 one for.. pres 2 for.. no REAL voice integreation.
"i'm 10 to 20 minutes late for my next appointment" and all others invited are automaticaly notified.. Call that integration, call that handy (when driving a car for example).
By voice you can instruct this electronic 'girl' to read out your mail.
And she even got pretty voice (well that depends on the language, the amrican girl sounded a bit more like bitch, but the dutch well.. hmm.. wonder if she could be dated)

I also think this is not real serious balance, comparing a top notch company mail system to a public free mail system. Not even in terms of troughput, user interface, or security, or worse even privacy (big google is watching that's publicly known).

It must be because of slashdot most readers admire linux, but even for those people if you like to you might use commandline only to configure tasks or install exchange, in fact the GUI gives and executes the command line code, which you might type by hand to (for every task). If you combine that with MS Core server...........
No i'm not against linux or other types of OS but had to many cases in which people could not explain their sendmail configuration which was halting proper mail flow.

I'll worry about this when...

[Nom du Keyboard]

I'll worry about this after I've actually archived my first GB if e-mails actually worth saving. Until then it's just Mine Is Bigger Than Yours posturing.

Re:I'll worry about this when...

[merreborn]

Ever since yahoo upped their limits, I haven't deleted a single email from my yahoo inbox. I'm well over 7,000, which is filling 130 meg of my 1 gig limit.

Granted, I don't use yahoo for my work mailbox, but we're not an attachment-happy bunch around here. If we need to share data, throw it on a website or in a wiki.

Wow

[Yetihehe]

Incredible, a 2gb mailbox. In Poland on wp.pl we have free 3gb mailboxes and in interia.pl we have guess what? Infinite size mailboxes (20mb per message). So where were microsoft hiding?

Re:Wow

[sznupi]

While trying to impress non-PL slashdotters don't forget about typical/slow/ad ridden interfaces and that interia has quite low limit on _number_ of mails you can keep in mailbox...

Me 2.

[Anonymous Coward]

More innovation from Microsoft Research Labs...

2 gigs is already here

[ZahnRosen]

I've got my exchange server setup with 2 gig mailboxes... Fortunately I've got a small number of users so thats not a problem. Its a shame SCSI drives are so expensive in quantity.

Don't forget SOX requirements

[fistfullast33l]

I know that in many public companies listed on American exchanges you are required to retain email in some cases forever. Yes, literally forever. SOX also requires you to document processes and a lot of that comes from email approval and such things. Most companies still block access to personal email accounts like GMail.

They'll even go a step further by providing you with a Blackberry so you have literally no excuse for you to use an external account as you have your email with you at all times on your portable device. Even better, to get around the small mailbox limit they'll create a .PST file on a network drive that you can archive to so you really have unlimited space as long as the hardware is kept up and the PST file doesn't corrupt.

I really think convincing people to move to GMail is some MIS student's thesis or something because it's a rather ridiculous idea in a real large corporate office environment.

Re:Don't forget SOX requirements

[Syrrh]

It's been pretty rare for me to find a .pst file truly corrupted post-office2k. The main culprit when it happens? Running a big .pst file from a network share. That's not a serious problem since a quick (well, 20-60 minutes) repair can fix it, but it is a hassle. Worse is that it makes users utterly helpless without a network hookup. What MS really needs is a scheduled function within Outlook to run backup operations, since only it can reliably control access to the .pst storage. There are already cleanup routines built-in, but they can only move contents, not create a copy. Just having it spit out a non-locked copy of the file occasionally would make backup work immensely easier and keeping a local copy safe for even the most paranoid users.

Re:Use ELM

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a 35,000 seat Enchange environment. We have users running Win32, Win64, MacOS, Linux, and a dozen other Operating Systems. We support just about every client software you can imagine from 'Fat' (MAPI) Outlook to phone-based clients (and in 2007 you can pick up the phone can call in to have you mail read to you). Our web-based mail client (OWA) supports most languages out of the box. We have mailboxes that are 2+ Gb today. Using something called 'Deleted Item Recovery' users can recover mail deleted up to seven days ago by themselves. I can restore a 1 Gb mailbox in less than 90 minutes. I can restore an entire database (500 users, usually about 350 Gb) in under two hours. If the mailbox or database being restored is corrupt, I can provide 'dial-tone' service (new, empty mailbox with the ability to send/receive) in five minutes while mail is being restored. These are real numbers -- we test them at least monthly. This happens on the production hardware as Exchange 2003 does not have the same restore limitations as 2000.

Don't gt me wrong, I do not agree with management's decision to use large mailboxes as there are better (and MUCH less expensive) ways to store files that provide the same type of access as email (Xythos, Sharepoint, etc.). However they don't pay me to make those decisions. They just pay me to shake my head and sigh at their stupidity while I make it work.

The biggest issue with ANY mail system that permits large mailboxes is the ability to backup and restore the data for Disaster Recovery purposes. In our case, that is 40 Tb of data. Regardless of which mail server we used, 40 Tb is a non-trivial amount of data to move to tape on a daily basis (and to move back when we get hit by the comet scheduled to slam into us next week.

Oh, and BTW... I haven't seen ELM in a while but Pine in IMAP mode works just fine against Exchange. In fact, we have many users doing just that today.

Current State of "Mobile Enterprise"

[EXTomar]

From my observations, the current state of "mobile computers" (ie your laptops and other machines that don't sit anywhere for too long) is that support is kind of wonky. Even if you can configure our enterprise to handle VPN connectings from the outside to the inside, when you arrive at the customer's location their enterprise might not be configured to allow VPN connections. The whole idea that one machine can bridge two very different networks isn't very feasible at the moment.

This isn't a knock against Exchange but this is a well known issue with Exchange itself. It tightly binds itself to a network and intranet and becomes very inflexible when you need it from another network/intranet. The reality of buisness today is that people and their machines are sometimes moving over many networks and intranets where Exchange simply will not be enough.

This leaves those out there now having to work around this. OWA simply doesn't work well enough especially in some configurations where trying to access Exchange by an exposed web portal may introduce a security risk and sometimes doesn't work at all. Gmail becomes a great workaround and is a surrogate conduit for office to office communication because unlike Exchange, HTTP is nearly universal and very well understood. Simply put, getting access to Gmail has a much higher rate of success than trying to negotiate VPN and domain access through multiple networks.

Re:Current State of "Mobile Enterprise"

[dr0n3]

As of Exchange 2003, one does not need to use OWA or Outlook over VPN to get exchange functionality.....it can do the RPC over HTTPS so no VPN - this is for full Outlook 03 client....lots of companies were deploying VPNs for the sole purpose of having their employees use Outlook outside of the organization (on laptops, from home, etc) and now no longer need to do so.

As far as the "mobile enterprise" my biggest concern right now is with backup. There are just no real good backup solutions for this....with desktops/servers we can run the backups/imaging during the off hours...with laptops they take it home with them, and having it run during business hours is not acceptable - laptop HDs are slow enough as they are, having a backup going on while trying to work would screech it to a halt, not to mention the possibility of inconsistency due to open files, etc. Right now the workaround is simply to have a shared folder for each user, putting the burden on the user to back their files up to the server. Even automated with scripts and such, it's still a cumbersome bandaid and doesn't solve the problem.

Re:Current State of "Mobile Enterprise"

[EXTomar]

Oh you are right, but then you must realize many companies out there are still going along with Office 2000 servers and services. Email is one of those things you really need to be careful about upgrading. Especially if maintaince and availablity is high, upgrading these servers is a huge issue.

Many companies have VPN implemented and deployed to the right people. The risk and cost of mokeying with Exchange servers is kind of high. I'm never surprised when I see a small to medium company using Exchange 2000 in this configuration using Gmail as a surrogate. Exchange 2000 works now (and still works with Office 2003 clients), VPN works now, Gmail works now and is free. I have mentioned that they can upgrade to Office 2003 server tools but then balk at the prices.

Re:Current State of "Mobile Enterprise"

[FlyingGuy]

Yet another reason to use GroupWise

GroupWise is completely modular. You can have many PO's and MTA's in a single World Wide Domain all interconnected across the the internet. It is proven tech, its clusterable, its rock solid and has no real limitations with the exception of the amount of disk space you can throw at it, which in native NetWare w/the Novell Storage System is pretty much as huge a RAID as you can buy. Couple that with either NAS or iSCSI and you have a pretty much unstopable solution.

Not only that its completely cross platform so regardless of the fact that you might be an OSX or Linux or Windows shop, you will have a GroupWise client for your machine. Now admitedly, they are currently a bit behind in getting all the other platforms on par with the feature set of the windows client, but this is shortly to be remedied.

Web Access? again built right in, it come with the software, a complete J2EE implentation on Tomcat & Apache. Use any browser from anywhere in the world to access your e-mail, complete with attachment viewing, no Active-X required, no requirement for the machine to have anything installed.

Wireless Access? You betcha it supports damn near every PDA and cellphone out there.

Now if that wasn't enough, there is no way for a e-mail trojan or virus to start working its way through your system just because it hapened to land in your in-box. GroupWise has purposefully never built an interface to allow code to run in its underlying structure, unlike some other E-Mail programs we all know about.

Remote mail boxes, caching mail boxes, yep we got those as well, and guess what, I really hope you have a BIG hard drive on your laptop, because I have seen caching DB's on laptops in excess of 20 gigs and that is not an exageration.

Evidence chain? Discovery chains? all there. backups and restores? Yes to the user level, while the system is on-line!

Standards... Yup GroupWise is fully complient with the RFC's for SMTP, POP3, IMAPI, SSL etc. Mailbomb Protection built in. ORDB, Spamhause etc. IP checking, built in.

Classes of Service? You bet, again built right in. You only want some of your users sending internet mail, you got it. You want some of your user to have limited visibility? Built in.

If you haven't checked out GroupWise in a while or you never have, I suggest you have a looksee at it and give it an honest evaluation.

Ohh yeah, I forgot to mention that it runs on NetWare, Linux & Windows servers. The entire GroupWise system is x-platform. Who knows they might even be building it for X-Servers too!

op is half right

[way2trivial]

Overall, things are more clear-cut for financial services firms, especially when it comes to individual brokers' and dealers' e-mails and IMs. Per NASD Conduct Rule 3010, financial firms must archive them. Then according to SEC Rule 17a, financial firms must keep all business records--which the NYSE defines as including e-mails and IMs--readily accessible for at least two years, and all transaction-related communications for seven years. Organizations must also produce such communications quickly as part of a court-ordered discovery process.
http://esj.com/enterprise/article.aspx?EditorialsI D=1545
and more
In particular, the law "says that any client of a public accounting firm may be required to produce documents related to audits or investigations," notes Rugullies. In the future, "it is conceivable that these items could include e-mails and IMs."

Flamethrowers

[killmenow]

I'm not the OP to whom you replied...but I saw mention of flamethrowers and I felt I must add my two cents...

I, personally, wouldn't use my flamethrower anywhere near a cat...unless it was a zombie cat. I mean, zombies are the only reason I have a flamethrower in the first place.

Re:Flamethrowers

[Kagura]

Don't forget bunker-clearing, when the South Rises Again.

Re:Flamethrowers

[empaler]

Well, I have the heavy arms in place to protect against raptors.

In small company why even use Exchange

[Iloinen Lohikrme]

I have a small software company and we use Gmail for domains. We get Gmail with out domain and calendar services. They are more than sufficient for a small company. Of course as we grow our needs are going to grow also, but at that time we think that Google will either offer an extended version of their service or even sell Gmail boxes for companies.

HUH?

[Jinjuku]

The only limits on a users Exchange Mailbox are the ones an administrator places as policy... Do some research before posting stuff like this.

"Eight-year-olds, Dude"

[7Prime]

Ya know what this reminds me of? Two eight-year-olds who don't like each other, and who automatically disagree with everything the other says, regardless of their own opinion. Remarkable how international coorporate politics resembles the mind of an 8-year-old with a bug up his ass.

Re:"Eight-year-olds, Dude"

[gfreeman]

No it doesn't.

You must be joking

[ribena]

= 20 MB mail boxes thankyou very much... Something to do with out IT department signing a ridiculously long contract with no foresight. Sound familiar?

in Egmont

[Anonymous Coward]

in small division of Egmont we do limit the sizes. We are not put down by the management. The management knows that keeping bigger boxes will cost money and resources. We have central servers for the big data available. When the management wants bigger mailboxes, they will give us, the IT-department more money for it. That's how it works if IT and management can work together.

Getting shot back down is usually only a problem in communication between IT and Management.

m10

Re:in Egmont

[Philosinfinity]

Definitely true, and in most prior positions, things ran this way. However, in a law firm environment, it is much more difficult to put restrictions in place. The dynamics are like this:

• Lawyers work for clients and brings in revenue to the firm
• Partners have equity or income shares in the firm. Thus, the more profit the firm makes, the more money the partner makes.
• IT department spends a portion of this revenue.

From the partners' perspective it is a simple matter: "I am directly paying you from my income. Because of this, I want to make sure I have every capability possible." As soon as you begin discussing limitations for any reason, you get the same response. "We're paying you to do this without limitations. Thus, we will proceed that way." The thing is that this phenomenon is not isolated to the firm I work in. Every firm any of my coworkers and myself have worked in are the same way.

Command-line *NIX tool

[noz]

I had a quick look the other day for something like Blat on Linux that does all the tedious stuff (supports domain logins and all that Windows wank) and came up with sweet nothing.

Anyone know of this? The source could be used to provide something like the Gmail Filesystem.

Kmail, Re:Exchange Mailbox Restoration

[Erris]

Restoring Exchange is hard, but it CAN BE DONE, bitches!

Don't you wish people would just use Kmail in Kontact so that archiving and restoration were easy?

Rights!?!? You want your rights!?!?

[Esion Modnar]

50% off 2-in-1 Machine Oil! Now get the fuck outta here!

Either Exchange is pathetic or I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

...TFA. My mailserver don't have any problems with mailboxes over 2 GB...

Re:Use ELM

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Mod me up, mod me down. Label me a troll or call me flamebait. Agree or dissagree with me, it don't matter. Nothing you can do will change the truth of my statement.

Right, it will stay as false as ever.

Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

MS is lagging behind. GMail is up to 2.7 gigs aproximately now.

The number one problem with SBS installations

[LibertineR]

You've got thousands of companies betting their life on a single SBS server, with no clue about what to do when they have a problem. Think about 75-person organizations betting their life on a single hard disk. I've seen it. Often. I have had to develop a professional vocabulary in order to stop asking clients if they are "fucking nuts" all the time.

SBS is a great deal for what you get in the box, but it is DANGEROUS if not handled properly with additional file servers and backups. I had a customer a few months back who lost everything because their former consultant set them up on RAID 0, doubling their risk for a little more speed.

Exchange 2007 is an AWESOME product, but I fear few people will ever realize how good it is, because it seems there are so few people who really understand how to perform even the basics of Exchange Administration.

Re:Use ELM

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod me up, mod me down. Label me a troll or call me flamebait. Agree or disagree with me, it don't matter. Nothing you can do will change the truthiness of my statement.

There, I fixed it for you.

To be fair

[goldcd]

after reading Wikipedia (I was interested in the precise meaning) nobody seems to have an f'in clue precisely what fascism is - just that it's a name that's been applied to loads of groups, by other people and never in a nice way.

Re:Use ELM

[illuminatedwax]

They're just fucking files!! Mail doesn't have to be any more complicated than that!! The fact that this is even a debatable topic shows how convoluted and silly the whole situation is.

wow 8gb of intra-office SPAM!

[wwiiol_toofless]

Every other email I get is completely, immediately deletable. Honestly if people cleaned their inboxes they wouldnt even come near a 2 gig limit, let alone 8. (yes there are always exceptions, I know.) Some people are just packrats, or are paranoid and think they need an e-trail for every minor decision made since they started working. CYA-noia. [/rant]

Or just use GroupWise

[FlyingGuy]

The GroupWise storage engine will grow to the limit of the Servers Maximim volume size. On NSS that is someplace WAY over a terrabyte. PST files are just stupid. Its *corporate* e-mail not the employees e-mail. I have lots of clients who's GroupWise system are well over 500 gigs and still growing. You say your server crashed? Grab last nights tape, restore the Groupwise system onto a new server just put into the tree, change a few paths and IP addresses and your right back in business. The MOST you will lose ( if its not on a cluster ) is the amount of e-mail since the last backup.

Netware... It does a server good.

Very misleading summary

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail:

Most companies, and especially any with an IT manager or lawyers worth their salt, would fire you for this. And rightfully so.

the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now.

Theoretically Exchange can have mailboxes much larger than 2GB today with Exchange 2003. In fact, you could do it with Exchange 2000. The problem isn't a software issue, but a management issue. If you have 300 users and they each have a 100 MB mailbox you get a mailbox store of about 30 GB. Microsoft has said that with Exchange there is a practical size limit of around 32 GB for a mailbox store database. Anything larger and that and you will start running into performance issues. So if you allow 2 GB mailboxes with 300 employees to get 600 GB of mail databases. That means having 19 separate mailbox databases of 32 GB, along with the log files associated with them. That's a lot of disk space. And sure, you can put it on a huge disk array, but because Exchange databases are so I/O intensive you're still going to run into system limitations. So then you have to break it out into multiple servers and/or a cluster, which in addition to the SAN to house the data ends up costing a lot more money.

So for a company of my size (~ 300 users) I can buy a 2-way or dual core server with 4 GB of RAM and 6x72GB disks running in RAID 0+1 (guesstimating about $8000) and limit users to 100 MB, or I can buy 3-4 of those servers and drop another $20,000-$30,000 on a SAN for storage and let people have 2 GB mailboxes. Which then begs the question, who really needs all that old data anyway when 99.9% of it will never be accessed after it reaches 30 days old?

Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape.

Oh really? Someone needs to explain to these people about the difference between fault tolerance and disaster recovery. If one of the servers in your cluster crashes hard, the others can take over. That's fault tolerance. If your datacenter was at the WTC or in New Orleans during the flood, you're going to need disaster recovery, which is where those backup tapes are gonna save your ass. Not only that, but there's new legislation that went into effect earlier this month regarding data retention policies and electronic discovery during lawsuits. If you don't have a backup on tape, and your only excuse to give the judge is "I'm sorry your honor, we must have deleted it and the cluster doesn't archive the old messages" you're gonna get the living shit fined out of you.

However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."

Ah yes...that's what we really need. The ability to access 3 years worth of emailed jokes from my mobile phone while I'm on vacation.

OK, take 0.5GB per user as an average

[leonbrooks]

Say your business has 300 users, you're suddenly looking at 150GB flat size for their email. Without any room for copying stuff around, any backups, file-tail losses, indexes, anything.

Now bump that to 2GB, and look down the throat of 600GB basic flat file sizes. And how fast is that going to get fragmented to pieces? If it's stored in mailboxes or the like, what happens to your server when two dozen users delete (or archive) a small corporate bulletin off the front of each of their 2GB mailboxes at once?

You're going to want competent RAID controllers just to keep up with the traffic, methinks.

Then your company takes over another floor of the building, and suddenly you're facing an 800GB starting size for your mailbox storage. You're going to find the resources to back this up, in a manageable fashion, from somewhere. I'd recommend RSyncing over a separate chunk of wire (so you don't snowball the LAN) & pushing the encrypted backups onto removable drives for the morning. Compressed, you might get away with 300GB drives.

Re:Use ELM

[Lord Apathy]

Thank you, thank you very much.....

/me leaves the building....

Bloat Expands To Fill The Available Space

[Steve B]

So now my cow orkers will find ways to convey 2 KB worth of information in a 20 MB audiovisual presentation instead of a mere 200 KB PowerPoint slide.

Oh they're PROMISING are they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft PROMISED they'd up Hotmail accounts to 1GB back when Gmail first came out, and I decided it was too difficult to copy all my mail over to gmail so I'd just stick with them THAT BEING THE CASE.

Fast forward a year or two, and I still had a measly 2MB mailbox, then they upgraded it to 20MB and FINALLY upgraded it to 1GB recently.

Microsoft's PROMISES aren't worth the paper they're written on.

+27 FlameBait

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait You still use Exchange?

mobile stuff is already exists

[MohammedDeVries]

another microsoft promise (the mail on mobile phone stuff) that already exist for a long time, upto more-than-many-gigbytes-you-never-use. you just need a smart phone with an imap client, and money for the data (why is it still so expensive?), even calendar stuff is already there e.g. xoffice.

Still, too many options

[bencvt]

Good point, but there's also such a thing as too many options.

(1) Microsoft has long supported drive mapping to network storage, more recently adding stuff like WebDAV support.
(2) Then there's Exchange public folders and increased mailbox storage (see TFA).
(3) Third, you've got the SharePoint for intranet web. You could say Microsoft CMS Server is a fourth option, but it's been discontinued, merged into SharePoint 2007.

The problem is that these three storage methods have COMPLETELY different UIs. One is integrated into the OS; two is a fat client (or OWA); three is Internet Explorer plus MS Office. Each have their various strengths and weaknesses, but that's not the point.

The point is it's confusing as hell for users to switch in between the three. (Wait, how do I copy this attachment in my email to my department's SharePoint site?) And yes, organizations do frequently implement all three (e.g., my employer does, and I'm in IT support this stuff :-)). Plus, many organizations may have a FOURTH (or fifth, or more) non-MS system in place to store generic user files, e.g. in-house wikis, one of the hundreds of CMSes out there, etc.

Solution? Better integration of these three methods and a more unified UI from MS, for one. Two, organizations need to plan it out better as to what data should go where. Right now, it's a murky picture at best.

Flame away

[GlobalMind]

I will gladly don my fireproof suit here for what I will say next.

Use IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and you would not have this problem with mailbox size. This Exchange crap of oh well we'll give you 2GB mailboxes in 2007 LOL what a crock.

We have Domino mail dbs well over 2GB today and have for years.

Of course you can pick many other mail systems too, but my focus is IBM, so there ya go.

Notes haters, flame away.

K.

Exchange vs Notes - Architecture & DR

[wildbillbuchan]

I've gotta bite on this.

One of the big problems (In my Humble Opinion) with Exchange is that its one (or a series of) JET based databases. I may be wrong, but I thought JET was something to do with Access. From a long time ago ?

So all the mail for the Exchange server is stored in a shared message store. Okay, you can break them up into a few smaller stores, but essentially if that Exchange server corrupts its data store, you have the choice to restore to your last good backup - if you have one - or spend around one HOUR per gigabyte rebuilding that data store.

So imagine you have 100 users, with say a gigabyte each. 100gb == 100 hours ?

Imagine your Exchange data store corrupts on monday at 9am, and 100 or so hours later - Thursday around noon, say - you can start using your mail again. Ouch, ouch, and double ouch. Remember, everyones out whilst that rebuild is in operation.

Notes/Domino servers tend to store their mail for each user in separate databases. One user screws his mailfile (and this is a very rare thing in my experience), then only one user is affected.

Second big difference is "clustering". On Domino servers, clustering is a application layer transaction "mirror" service that fires network traffic to the other servers, so anytime I make a change to any document on my mail file, all other servers in the cluster that host that mail file get a copy of the update, within a second. Note that each server has its own set of databases, and that by default, all Notes clustering is active-active. Up to six (recommended,but I've seen more) servers, in a cluster, all feeding over reasonably fast network links (10mbit or more recommended.)

So from a DR point of view, you slap two domino servers down - one in the office, and one in the DR site, and with any sort of reasonable network link, you have two standalone machines that keep themselves in sync, and automatically fail over. I've seen people try and do this over ISDN lines - its very very slow, not recommended, etc, but does work.) So just about any reasonably modern wet bit of string will work.

We've had this in the domino world (publically) since v4.5 circa 1996 (we're on v7 now, with v8 next year). Its actually really boring. It just works.

Oh. Domino, remember is multi-platform. Seeing a lot of Linux servers going out on the smaller environments replacing MS windows, and seeing a lot of Solaris, AIX, iSeries and even zSeries in the medium to large environments. Large Pharma, for instance, seems hooked on iSeries - one company I'm aware of servicing over 100,000 accounts from just a dozen (suitably huge) iSeries boxes. And I've seen huge version number mixing going on too - one site I know still has 350+ OS/2 based Notes v4.5 clients (for a particular hard-coded application) but still use more modern v6.5 servers on the back end. Not a biggie, really. Its akin to using Outlook from 1995 against an Exchange 2007 server...

(Of course Domino isnt just mail - its an application infrastructure too. Mail might only represent 30% of the total disk space allocation on a reasonably sized environment).

In the Exchange world, my understanding of "clustering" is that more than one server has to SHARE a physical hard drive subsystem of some description (and already someone previously commented that Exchange doesnt play well with NAS). If that network link "burps" at any point, things get a little scary. So I was privy to a meeting where even with a 100mb/s link, Exchange 2003, and under 200 users, a corporate was scared to "cluster" their Exchange servers as they were convinced that it'd ultimate corrupt itself. As did the Exchange consultant that day - a published Exchange Author. I for one was shocked.

What does this mean ? The biggest mail file I've seen on Domino in the wild - actually in use - was 256gb. Yup. 256gb. About 75gb bigger than the 172gb maximum data store size mentioned above. (Dont ask what they were using it for...)

In my experience, a well ran Domin

How about some balance?

[WebCowboy]

And a company thinking they can be fascist about everything risks losing their employees.

Well, if the IT dept. is a bunch of control freaks that lock down things so badly their employees struggle to get their work done it is a problem. However, if you call your employer fascist for using proxy servers, firewalls, VPNs, corporate anti-virus and so on to run a tight shift then you risk losing your employer (and a good reference to use on your hunt for your next job). I think most employers take a dim view of employees who have such a negative view about the company and who consciously try to thwart measures put in place to keep IS infrastructure secure and reliable.

There are two kinds of organisations that can afford to provide luxuries like seamless remote access and multi-gigabyte inboxes in house: Very large, tech-savvy enterprises like Google and Microsoft (who can give such things out like candy) or very small, tech-savvy outfits (such as self-employed consultants or an employee count in the dozens or less) where a mid-range server-class PC has the capacity to provide this and it can be managed by one egghead. The rest of medium to large enterprises with hundreds to thousands of users do have a challenge--especially those businesses that are not in the tech industry and cannot dedicate huge resources to set of a big data centre. Thus, the vast majority of workers have to contend with relatively tiny inboxes and somewhat less-than-integrated systems.

These days, however, I really do NOT see the justification for forwarding corporate email to a public account like gMail or Hotmail. You have a bit of a problem managing your in-box if you need a gigabyte. The vast majority of employers with personnel who need remote access now provide VPNs or otherwise have some secured/encrypted remote accessibility to email and selected other systems too. Furthermore, things like customer contact lists, purchase orders, estimates and so on are fairly private. We wouldn't like to have people send our credit card statements, including the account number and expiry and details of all our purchases, to be sent un-encrypted and without our knowledge of when and where it is going. If personal private info can be afforded this protection why can't businesses have a reasonable level of privacy too?

It seems interesting that there was enough demand for a 2GB mailbox offering for any reason anyhow. I am quite a hobbyist and a one-time self-employed consultant and still have my own email server so I can set my limits however I want--I have set up to accept 256MB attachments and have 40GB of space allocated for use as my mail store/home directory. Despite that I've never received an email message over about 25MB and my inbox has never even reached 1GB much less 2GB. I have IMAP set up and keep things organised in multiple folders and the entire email directory of all folders, with years of messages, is a small fraction of that. If I have large binary attachments the message gets deleted and the file gets put outside mail into the home or shared directories. Given the usage my personal wide-open setup I see even less justification for corporations to dedicate such capacity, so I'd expect that any employee who asks for the ability to forward to gMail or get his own email-gigabox would have to present a convincing case of extraordinarily special needs. More than likely such employees just have a fetish for big fancy technology and want bragging rights. I have only seen in VERY rare cases recently where corporations do not put significant effort into providing for the access needs of their remote employees.