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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."

4 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 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.

  2. 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).