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)

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).

http://www.google.com/mobile/gmail/ [google.com] 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?

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.

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 :)

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...

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.

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.

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!

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. </sarcasm>

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>

That's why I'd use Pine mail still, if it was an option where I work.

--nutz

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

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.

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.

- "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.

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 [esj.com]
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."

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...

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.

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.

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.