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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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

[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

[thrillseeker]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

2GB?

[nagora]

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

Re:2GB?

[kosmosik]

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

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

[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.

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?

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.

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).

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?

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.

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...

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.

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!

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

[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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

"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.

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: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.