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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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: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?

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

"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.