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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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:Wow - how inovative

[operagost]

Too bad no one is able to actually use Notes.

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

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: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?

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.

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: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: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

[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.

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.