What Corporate Email Limits Do You Have?

roundisfunny wonders: "We currently do not have any mailbox restrictions for our Exchange users - which has led us to have a 420 GB mail store for 320 users. Our largest mailbox has over 13 GB in it. One of the main concerns for us is the time it takes for a restore. We have encouraged archiving, but now have 250 GB of .pst files. What sort of limitations does your company have on mailbox size, amount of time you can keep mail, and archives? Please mention your email platform, type of business, and number of users."

Business Limits

[chill]

Our current setup (Exchange,30 users) limits people to 100 Mb of online e-mail storage. I consider this obscenely small, but I'm not the admin here and HAVE been on the other side of the fence, so can see the reasons.

Last time I was admin it was 50 users, Exchange 2000 and the biggest e-mail boxes were 2 Gb or so.

This is actually a simple issue, if you look at it from a business perspective.

E-mail is a mission-critical service in most businesses. If e-mail stops, lots of places will grind to a halt. So, it needs to be treated with the appropriate respect and budget.

Get all the costs necessary for a proper setup: RAID-5 or RAID-10 SCSI, or maybe a SAN. Proper backup, either e-Vaulting or automated tape with weekly off-site rotation (GFS scheme). You might want to consider redundant equipment for a warm stand-by. Price all that out and give it to management, then limit them to what management will pay for since much of your cost will be dictated by Gb.

While 500 Gb IDE drives may be cheap, a corresponding RAID array of server-class SCSI drives isn't and proper tape storage is also not cheap. Let business necessities provide the answers here.

  -Charles

Storage limits and mailbox management

[Grimfaire]

We have a 60MB Limit for warning with a 90MB limit for receiving and a 120MB limit for sending and receiving. We have some 300+ users and this keeps our mailbox store at a manageable level and allows for quick mailbox restores from backup. We have users archive to a .pst file on a SAN that is in the backup rotation. Since we can add storage to the SAN on the fly, it's not a problem with overall storage. We also issue quarterly documents discussing mailbox storage and how-tos in an effort to educate our users on what is acceptable to keep and what isn't. Lastly, we have a bi-yearly "purge" of mailboxes. Where our staff generates a report and finds the top 20 mailboxes and pst files and does individual sit downs with them on how to better manage their mailboxes. As we're also under the HIPAA rules, all deleted mail goes into an archive that is offloaded periodically to follow the rules.

Re:For God's sake

[pmc]

While it it pretty obvious they didn't read your post but did stumble across an important truth: "they may be required to save all their mail"?

All means all. Audit requirements may mean absolutely no outbound or inbound e-mail that does not go through the corporate e-mail system for whatever compliance or confidentiality reasons there may be.

There is also the risk of letting something viral in via webmail. It may have got in via the corporate system anyway but this doesn't matter. You have an expectation of service from an internal AV system or from a bought service such as messagelabs, but absolutely none from Google or any other webmail service: you are not exercising due care and you are toast if it goes wrong. Especially with google - gmail is only a beta.

Now, you may be on slightly thicker ice if you let people use webmail and tell them to be careful, but if you give them something it is your responsibility. Never give people a tool that you cannot control the workings of if you can help it.

I know this seems overly ass-covering and paranoid, but, hey, welcome to modern business.

Re:For God's sake

[Tozog]

Exchange uses SIS in that situation, so only 1 copy of the 1.3 MB file is in the database, no matter how many users you sent it to or how many replied or how many forwarded the attachment on.

Re:Education

[ROOK*CA]

My other suggestion is to register everybody a Gmail account for personal use and then have a special talk with the biggest inbox abusers

Perhaps the "inappropriate" remark was based on the presumption that it's not a very good idea to allow your user base to access free mail services from inside your network, let alone encouraging them to do it. After all most businesses are a bit shy about having totally uncontrolled conduits for data flowing into and out of the network, no?

I could see simply helping your user base out with a suggestion for a personal gmail account as long as it was qualified with "but don't expect to be able to access it while your on the company network"......;)

Re:Nope

[Tozog]

It is true SIS only saves spaces inside a single storage group, but the rules for what replicates a new copy is a bit more complex. Taking a message with an attachment and forwarding it on to more users in the same storage group does not create another copy of the attachment in the store. If you saved the attachment to your local drive and then reattached it to a new email, it would create a new copy of the attachment in the database.

For the non-Exchange tech speakers, SIS stands for Single Instance Storage and applies to messages and attachments in Exchange. Exchange tries to be smart about storing messages and attachments by storing only a single copy of an email no matter how many people it is sent to. All the messages or attachments are really just references back to the original message/attachment. As stated above, it breaks down across storage groups, but does save quite a bit of space in each storage group.

Re:Education

[Jim_Maryland]

My other suggestion is to register everybody a Gmail account for personal use

You may also find that some companies block access to external email sites like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc... My employer found that most of the infections on the network were related to content from outside email services so their solution was to keep people from accessing them. People could forward messages from home if needed and the messages would still go through the regular virus scans/checks/etc.... While the policy can be pretty annoying at times, people have adjusted to the policy.

As for email limits, I believe ours is set around 43MB on the Exchange server. We do have local files (stored on a network drive) that are not subject to the size rule on the email server, but are addressed by a corporate policy (which I would guess most people likely break). We also have a retention policy of 90 days for messages unless a user moves it to their personal files (.pst).

Easy enough

[lilmouse]

I used to work in a financial-systems company. On of our customer service people had his .pst fill up when it reached 2 gig. I'd estimate that at *least* 95% of his e-mail was work related. Won't say much else, but it was a pain in the *ss to fix.

--LWM

Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange

[BridgeBum]

There's a handy "Tape Archive" utility for that. It's called 'tar'. Maybe you've heard of it.

Lots of users, small mailboxes

[ModernGeek]

The company I work at, BestBuy, has about 800 stores with about 30 people from each store with a company email address. You get about a 2MB mailbox before it locks you out of your email, and you have to change your password once every 2 weeks. Anybody can send you an email, but you can only check it from within the intranet using their web interface through their employee toolkit, or any computer attached to the intranet. Feel free to ask questions.

from an email hog....

[ykiwi]

email is a basic tool like the phone - it should just work.

I'm a management consultant (sorry sorry sorry), and my email box often hits the limit within days or weeks of arriving at a new client. It is annoying as anything, and it's an early sign of a poorly run stupid-rules-based IT shop.

I've seen people delete unread and unanswered emails just so that they can respond to a more urgent one.
I've dealt with people who could seldom send email as their limits were always exceeded, and they didn't know what to do
I've seen people adopt the only solution they can - archiving their email to their laptop HDD - not a great place to leave your only copy of your crucial business info.
I've (sadly) written PPT preentations and spreadsheets that are to big to email versus the internal limits. zipped.

Why do people want to keep all their emails?
- I am not a lawyer, nor do I (I hope) write emails that are legaly dubious.
- I want to keep records of all my business transactions - so my non spam non trivial email is not deleted.
- Spotlight/google desktop are great for finding those old, vital emails. no need to sort them

How can emails get so big?
Some organisations have a 'send the link, not the file' policy. Depressingly few however. Where this doesn't work then my inbox rapidly fills up with all sorts of (mainly MS Office) binaries.
When working on a important document there will be multiple versions flying around. Keeping older versions is important, as you can see who did what and when.
Spreadsheets and datasets are getting bigger - many of my key spreadsheets are over 10mb.
Pictures, movies and sound are increasingly part of everything we do, e.g. powerpoint presentatons (yes I can't stand powerpoint, but people do use it)
Zipping is a pain.

What should IT do?
  I advocate nagging at certain points, but not a set limit.

Some users are data people, and they are sending around big datasets, be it on spreadsheets or otherwise. Get to know them, work with them but for goodness sakes help them as they are vital to the company. Whatever you do don't stop them from doing their stuff without implementing a better solution. (can you hear the voice of experience?)

follow your company's archive rule, but don't forget to check those laptops....

Macro to remove attachments from selected emails

[Bazouel]

This macro will remove attachments from the current selection of mail items in Outlook. Pretty handy ...

Sub RemoveAttachments()
Dim selection As Outlook.selection

Set selection = ThisOutlookSession.ActiveExplorer().selection

Dim i As Integer
Dim element As Object
For i = 1 To selection.Count
Set element = selection.Item(i)

If TypeOf element Is Outlook.MailItem Then
Dim mail As Outlook.MailItem
Set mail = element

Dim j As Integer

For j = mail.Attachments.Count To 1 Step -1
mail.Attachments.Remove (j)
Next

mail.Save
End If
Next
End Sub

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

File servers for in-house; ftp/web for external

[billstewart]

So for in-house use, run a file server with Samba or some Microsoftish protocol that employees can mount on their machines - you can walk out of Fry's with a 1TB server for around $700, and you can waste a lot more employee time by not doing it :-) To deal with the external world, you'll probably want an FTP (actually one of the SSH variants) or web server - there are various tools that let people drag&drop files using http to store things.