What Corporate Email Limits Do You Have? 501
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."
For God's sake (Score:5, Insightful)
My other suggestion is to register everybody a Gmail account for personal use and then have a special talk with the biggest inbox abusers.
P.S. You didn't mention your "type of business." That woulda helped us elvaluate your situation a bit better.
Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:5, Insightful)
don't waste your time (Score:5, Insightful)
You will be better served if you breakdown usage by department and bill them accordingly. That is disk space, backup tapes, off-site storage, salaries, and so forth. Even if no money changes hands between departments, putting a cost to it is more likely to get someone to (re)act.
I'm not saying that a "let's delete old files" campaign won't work, but the ones who are most likely to do something (the engineers) are not the ones eating most of the space.
- doug
None (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I don't even bother. If people want to keep all of the e-mail that they've ever sent or received and are willing to pay for the infrastructure to support it, why should I stop them?
Open your mouth (Score:3, Insightful)
Offline Archival (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually look at some of the people's email accounts, you'll notice that they never empty their deleted items folder. We informed people that they should move stuff out of their deleted items if they want to save it, and then 2 weeks later set up a policy to empty all of the deleted items folders. This cleared up over 10 GB on a network with 150 users.
Of course, anything you do should be authorized by your management, since some situations are dictated by law. Since we were funded by government grants, we were required to keep 7 years of emails related to the programs. You'll also cover your a** this way, since if someone has a complaint about you doing something, you can refer them to your supervisor.
Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Education (Score:4, Insightful)
best practices (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exch
Second, as for storage limits, I would limit their exchange storage to 1GB per user, and (if you can. this only works with MSOffice Outlook) on the server side, set a autoarchive policy to archive files older than a few months to their archive folder on their PC except for the Deleted items (30 days then delete) and Junk Mail (7 Days then delete).
Third, Make sure they are made aware of any change that will affect their exchange mail store, that way, when Jim moans about how he lost all of his mail in Deleted Items after a month in there, you can point him to the memo.
Re:Education (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens in the company stays in the company.
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you consider it to be inappropriate? My email is backed up daily, is searchable, and provides a nice indexed (by date/sender/subject) record of my work.
Not nearly enough information (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have regulatory and compliance issues, and almost everyone does these days, then you can set a much smaller mailbox size and enforce archiving or deletion. In my environment, 15000 Exchange users with heavy regulatory and compliance requirements, we allow 100MB for the typical user, 250Mb for a supervisory employee, 500MB for middle management and 1Gb for some really higher ups. We have a total of just under 2TB of live maail at the moment, and roughtly 10tb archived.
There are alot of really cool products on the market like CommVault DataMigrator for Exchange, and EMC email extender to make alot of this seamless for you. You can use these produicts to move all of the stale (and you can define stale according to a bunch of different criteria) data off to slower (ie cheaper) storage and out of your message stores. The mail migrator will leave a stub in exchange which looks just like a mail message in outlook. The only difference is that if someone opens one of these older messages they have to wait a couple of seconds while it is brought back into the message store. The whole process is transparent.
These products aren't cheap, but they wind up saving a ton of money, as well as improving performance because you can use much less fast storage for email, your backup needs decrease by a huge amount since you only archive like once a month (and therefore only back that data up once a month), and as a bonus you can easily meet all regulatory and compliance requirements.
Re:That said... (Score:5, Insightful)
Limiting attachment sizes seems to curb the worst of the problems... but a lot of non-technical people will scream and kick about having to upload files to a server. When you explain to them that email storage is extremely, extremely expensive (because it has to be hyper-reliable), and website storage can be very cheap, they're often more accommodating. And you can usually automate it fairly well with a good client, like VanDyke's stuff.
I usually offer to set up a cron job to wipe a web transfer directory every day... this means the user doesn't need to remove the files they've uploaded. (so they don't give today's files to tomorrow's recipient by accident.) Some people like that: some people don't. Some want both a temporary and a permanent site, which is easy to set up.
Routine external-user password changes are a very good idea in this kind of setup. Fortunately, it's easy to script. It can run with the file-wipe.... autogenerate a new http auth password for the day and email it to the user. If there were no files to wipe, don't make a new password.
Whatever they like is cool with me, as long as they don't use Exchange for file storage.
You Got That Right. (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure it's huge. Sure it's a mess. But, it'll cost a fortune to do it right and if management doesn't choke on the cost and demand that you implement limits immediately, you have no way of avoiding it. And why would you want to anyway? It's not your money. If they want to waste their money, don't let your puritanical geekiness get in the way. Spend the money to do it right and make your life easy.
Re:For God's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
1st Question: What resolution are the photos at?
2nd Question: What compression?
I have a pal in real estate who invested mucho dinero on a bangin comp and camera because it was "so" necessary to have when showing off a piece of property. One day, he gets a hold of me to look at his very laggy computer and I find thousands of photos of houses (about 25 per house with one being labeled -Final- each) each photo at some insane resolution of 2048.
I asked him what he needed such high-res photos of the houses for and he said "I need the best photo possible when advertising." I asked him to show me a sample of the advertisement and, no kidding here, he popped out a magazine with a few of the houses at 3"x3".
So we filtered out what photos he wanted to keep, archived the old/irrelevant ones (just used winrar), and set his camera to default to 800.
Sure enough, we freed up about 30GB (then defragged for the sake of his VirtMem)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Storage limits and mailbox management (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail is not a good correspondence/document storage system, but it works for most ordinary human beings. So they use it for that. And taking away that functionality is counteproductive to the needs of the actual system users.
sPh
Why Limit them? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:2, Insightful)
wtf? (Score:2, Insightful)
Dumb idea to put limits on mailboxes (Score:2, Insightful)
I - like many of my colleagues - archive almost every mail. Why? Because we live in a highly political organization where an old mail can save your butt.
So (because we have an arbitrary 50MB mailbox limit) when I archive I have to make a copy of everything to my (HUGE 50GB) set of PST file. I say set because PST files are not terribly reliable when they get big. This is disadvantage #1.
On to #2 - Because many of the mails we receive are to multiple users - we now explode the amount of storage that is required. Why? Because Exchange does a reasonable job of ensuring that a mail with a 1MB attachment to 500 users only keeps one copy of the attachment. Guess what happens when we all archive it to a PST? Yep - 500MB.
On to #3 We use OWA (the web front end to Exchange). When I'm using this I no longer have access to my PSTs - because they're on my shared drive. This sucks.
So PLEASE - all you Exchange admins. STOP putting dumb limits on your Exchange storage. We're going to use that storage anyway - it's just somewhere else.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Mail is not storage and Exchange sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
The nice thing about Exchange (I'll burn for using those five words in sequence) is that all your information is stored in one place. You can search and manage it from 1 interface and backups/full disks/etc are being dealt with by the system administrators.
By using
The size of the mailbox reveals the problem. It's not being used for mail, but for file storage. The only real solution to this is the education of you users. I know, dealing with users is one of the hardest parts of being a system administrator, but no technical solution will help you here (except for completly blocking attachments).
Unfortunately training will only go so far. Nowadays it's normal to send 5mb Word documents around. Expecting users to choose a sensible fileformat, and reducing images to realistic resolutions is one bridge to far. So you'll still have to deal with many multi-megabyte mails.
This is where the Exchange sucks parts comes into play. Exchange just isn't very good at dealing with huge mailboxes. When discussing mailbox limits the usual response seems to be "Yeah, we could add a few more disks, but we also need a much bigger server. The current machine can barely keep up with the load as it is".
First things first (Score:4, Insightful)
1) E-mail is not a file transfer protocol.
2) Public folders (in the Microsoft Exchange sense) are not meant for use as a file server
Next you have to get management to purchase a couple things:
1) An on-demand e-mail archival solution. This product should integrate with your MUA (probably Outlook). The users should be able to locate and extract an archived email from the archival solution quickly and with minimal effort; otherwise the solution will not be utilized.
2) A better spam filter. I'd be willing to bet that a large part of your mail store is spam. There is no auditing requirement to archive non-business-related e-mail. Can the spam.
3) A web-based file-transfer/file-sharing solution. Since you're going to stop people from receiving large attachments via email (you are, aren't you?) you need to provide a method of transfer. One method is to use any of a hundred free or commercial trouble ticketing products like Request Tracker [bestpractical.com] or even Bugzilla [bugzilla.org] to create a secure way to transfer files between an external source and an internal employee by attaching files to an open and assigned ticket. There are numerous products out there that can satisfy this requirement, especially in these post-Sarbanes-Oxley/HIPAA/GLBA/etc times.
Next up is to clean up the PST nigthmare. I was recently involved as a consultant in the IT department of a company about your size. Dozens of their users had reached the 2GB PST limit numerous times. Their PSTs were rotated out and they simply started a new PST. The old PSTs were of course opened automatically within Outlook. These PSTs were stored on the company's main file server in the users' home directories. At some point we eventually realized that all incoming mail was delivered straight to PST instead of the users' mail spools in the information store. The day after this one of our Windows admins happened to notice that the text of the users' home directories were blue. That's right; they were compressed. Whoops! As a temporary solution for a failing mail server the previous admin staff decided to deliver mail straight to PSTs. This of course became the long-term practice. Soon they ran low on disk space. To solve this the temporarily enabled compression on the single large volume that this Windows server served to the LAN. This too became the long-term solution. Uncompressed I want to say that the data was around 800GB. Compressed it was 450GB or so. The admin staff didn't tell management what was going on and to the best of my knowledge management didn't ask or simply thought all was well. Our Windows admins are still trying to clean up this mess and these are the best Windows guys I've ever met.
Instigate policies that limit the amount of time received mail, sent items, deleted mail, drafts, etc are kept in the main inbox. A good archival solution should be able to mimick your policy in its config. Delete the deleted items daily. Dump the drafts every 2 weeks. Archive the sent items once a month. Archive the inbox every 3 months (quarterly, twice a year, whatever fits your needs).
Above all you have to get management's support and backing. Without that your pissing in the wind. Some squeaky-wheel middle management person with a Napolean-complex will put the brakes on the whole thing if you don't have upper-management's support. To get this support show them in dollars how much it would cost to restore the entire PST collection if you had a SAN failure (you do have a SAN, don't you?). Show them how much time you spend each week restoring mailboxes of enourmous size. Show management auditing requirements and how you don't meet them with your current setup. There's a lot you can do. Best of luck.
Re:Use a time quota, not a size quota (Score:2, Insightful)
It'd be nice if we'd get a reminder that messages are about to disappear -- no issues with making folks stay on top of email, but it sucks to have stuff auto-disappear into the ether..
Re:For God's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
"Email is not a filesystem".
Put it on a network share and point everyone to it.
If they are outside the company, then that may be an exception, or put it in a blind anonymous FTP area that gets swept once a week.
Re:I forward everything to gmail (Score:4, Insightful)
Low Email storage limits are another reason why IT's reputation continues to worsen. If an internet company can offer 2GB+ of email storage to millions of users for FREE, then why can my large company offer more than 100MB of email storage to five thousand professional staff?
Because that's how the Internet Company makes it's money. They make money by giving mass amounts of storage to people who will use their service and view ads based on the content of the email. In other companies, email is a cost center. It costs more money to give that much storage. If we were to provide 2GB of storage for each of our users, we would have to have well over 3TB space on the email server. That costs money and the company doesn't want to spend it.
On the email system I manage (Exchange 2000) for 1600 users, we have a limit of 75MB per mailbox. Rediculously small, yes, but when you only have 200GB total, including larger mailboxes for marketing, VP level and higher and service accounts that send and receive a huge quantity of large messages and management doesn't want to spend money, that's what you get. We set Outlook to automatically empty Deleted Items except for those that want to store messages in their deleted items (Wha--???????? - [I shrug] whatever you say...) and have their "recover from deleted items" purge themselves after 2 months. The good news is we are about to upgrade our email system to about 1TB storage. We will likely edge the mailbox sizes up, but won't tell anyone. If we did, they'd start expecting unlimited storage again. Besides, we continue to grow. We've nearly doubled in size in the six years I've been there. Yes, it gets expensive when you need to provide some rediculous number of 9's worth of uptime. Having an email server cluster that is replicated to a duplicate cluster at the DR site gets quite expensive. Want massive uptime for the same price? Pay for it in storage.
Oh, and a 10MB per message limit. Once they get a few of those and fill their mailbox, they delete the hundreds of tiny messages before finally calling me. I explain the difference between byte, kilobytes and megabytes and explain that this one email takes up the space of 10,000 of these smaller ones. Yes, they need training. I've already put it in the company newsletter. You know those things don't apply to them.
Yes, it's been a long day. I'll shut up now.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Educate your users (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail is a service used by employees to get work done. In the case of marketing/sales types, 1GB of saved e-mail is common, and it's critical business data. Yes, some of that data is binary, but it is critical.
Often administrators impose quotas, let the users whine a bit, and then the whining subsides. The adminstrators think that the problem is solved; nope, what actually happened is that all that critical e-mail just got moved to local folders. When that local hard disk inevitably crashes, taking the critical data for a $1 million sales deal along with it, the whining will turn to screaming.
The solution (in my opinion) is for administrators and companies to reevaluate how much e-mail is worth to users. For many, I'd argue it's worth many thousands of dollars. I'm sure some of that money could be used for a reasonable amount of storage.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm...none the I'm aware of. Exchange is not a "mail system". The mail in Exchange is just a component of the GROUPWARE SUITE.
Yes, lots of you can do just fine with email and email only. Lost of you can do just fine "archiving" to your local hard drive, and not having group scheduling, or shared contacts. But in many parts of the real world, we IT folk configure tools for users that empower them to do what it is that they do however they choose to do it. And we're happy to contune dealing with the challenges required to solve the problems that arise along the way.
Exchange is a bear. It needs to be tricked into doing what you want it to do as much as it gets traditionally administered, but it is, hands down, one of only two tools in its class (Lotus Notes being the other) that are capable of performing for the type of groupware most real communication-driven businesses need. And by perform, I am including the occasional chewing gum and duct tape fix to keep things moving. So I'm hardly a fanboi....and a matter of fact I WANT MORE CHOICES BECAUSE WHAT I HAVE NOW SUCKS. But that's all there is at the moment.
Please respond to this thread with the other options, one per reply, to which I and others will happily list the reasons why they simply won't do in most situations.
Re:Business Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thats what you get for running Exchange (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh, you picked the wrong day to say that. After my mailserver had weird problems over the weekend (of the 'Cyrus sucking down 100% CPU time in index_checkseen while making no system calls' variety), I ran a reconstruct...which took two and a half hours. (Thankfully, it did fix the problem.)
The episode was probably brought on by unusual circumstances - I have an ancient version of Cyrus imapd (2.0.16) and ran out of /var space last week - but it shows that Cyrus does indeed have giant databases that can complicate operation.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you could avoid the costly training, and buy a $200 400 gB drive and double your disk space overnight and focus on other stuff, like making great products for instance.
Re:For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Person C make one line edit, sends back to A, B, D, E and F
Person D changes a single letter typo, sends to A, B C, E and F
Person A, B, C, D, E and F never delete old email, "just in case they need it one day"
its hard to imagine 320 knowledgeable computer users having 420GB of work email, its very easy to imagine 310 luddites having 418GB of redundant crap because they don't use a single repository.
Re:from an email hog.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real problem is that you (and lots of other people) are using an email system to do something it simply wasn't designed for, and it's a strain for the users, the administrators, and often for the server too.
Often what is required is an information management system, where you can store and exchange information with others, and which will tell you when new information arrives which is relevant to you.
That may sound like email, but there are some very basic differences. Imagine you email somebody a document, they change it and send it back. You've now got two separate instances. Do that a few times, and things get messy; it would be better if you had a single instance which could be changed. You could see who changed what, and when.
How do you sort your information? Maybe by date, or by name or subject. What if you want to sort by sales region and by partner account? Email isn't that extensible, but an info management system will do that. You can generally go further and have whole virtual folder trees that will let you find the information you want much more easily. Email normally only has fixed folders. Some email clients have virtual folders that are search results, but that's not the same thing and it's not as fast (doesn't scale).
A decent information management system will also define who can see what, and when (for information that has a lifecycle), and will be accessible in all the same places that the email server is. That means that partners or clients can have controlled access to data on your server that is related to them, and may be permitted to change or add information. This removes much of the need for email, although you can have the system email you when someone changes or adds something.
Once you have started working with such a system, everything suddenly becomes much more coordinated, and you leave email to do what it was supposed to do - be an electronic replacement for posting something.
-- Steve
Re:Storage limits and mailbox management (Score:5, Insightful)
Trouble is there isn't one.
You wouldn't think of keeping all of your snail mail in a single box.
Actually, if I had a simple, automatic way of copying the entire thing and searching it, I most certainly would.
Contrary to common belief, users don't use their email as a universal archive to annoy IT departments, they do it because they don't have a better option. The reason they don't have a better option, is graphically demonstrated from the numerous replies in this forum suggesting things like "FTP" and "CVS" as suitable alternatives.