Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the supersize-it dept.

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."

13 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Exchange 8GB mailboxes today by RobGeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today by Philosinfinity · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today by Philosinfinity · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today by Volante3192 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today by Muffhead · · Score: 2, Informative

      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....

  2. Wow - how inovative by woodyanderson · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  3. Isn't it obvious? (was:2GB?) by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.
    --
    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
  4. Re:People actually do this? by wandazulu · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  5. Re:The Real Problem by joeytmann · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
  6. Re:People actually do this? by dave562 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:People actually do this? by devilspgd · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
  8. In small company why even use Exchange by Iloinen+Lohikrme · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
  9. Re:People actually do this? by slash.dt · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.