MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes 353
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."
People actually do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People actually do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:People actually do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
If they can't even hire someone to run a mail server, and/or can't afford the hardware (including drives) and/or outsource it, they're probably not in a position to support the products they're selling, and may not even be around in the future to offer upgrades.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:People actually do this? (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People actually do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:People actually do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [orwell.ru]. 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
To be fair (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Technically, the grandparent was correct, and you are incorrect.
Re:People actually do this? (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget SOX requirements (Score:2)
They'll even go a step further by providing you with a Blackberry so you have literally no excuse for you to use an external account as you have your email with you at all times on your
Re: (Score:2)
Document retention policies do not.
Exchange 8GB mailboxes today (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
It is a shame that people have to resort of abusing email to store/share files.
-matthew
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
well sourcesafe is next to useless at actually doing what it should be good at... holding the important files and emails for a project. It's crap and dangerously flaky when the database is larger than a few gig, not to mention the fact that your critical data gets locked into a proprietary format. I'd have us using CVS at my place of work if I had any say in the matter, but they're a stick in the mud microsoft only shop... if it
Re: (Score:2)
Beyond the issue of using email for file storage -- she keeps 8 gigs on GMail? How do I get 8 gigs from them?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
This is just another example of the flawed logic of Windows users. That the desktop machine is the right place to store useful data. I
Re: (Score:2)
In reality, the world is different today than it was back when POPing your messages down to your local machine was the norm. It was a world where bandwidth and server-side storage space was much more precious. I know even back then, my university account had a fairly tiny quota. If I wanted to keep many emails past a few months, downloading them via
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
This is slashdot.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 presentat
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
- 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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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:
Re:Exchange 8GB mailboxes today (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Did they ask everyone's IT department first? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
That happens when you deal with outside companies. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
... but still have them availabl
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
Re: (Score:2)
Our company moves all attachments older than about a month to an external archive. And we use Exchange Server and Outlook.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And your method is completely useless where I work, where no ones msg is text, they are either
word docs, pdf docs or html links to the first 2.
Also in the corpse world, when I get "Meeting tomorrow at 9am" msg, 24bytes, which is
sent as a Word DOC (128kb), that word doc is chewing up space at orders of magnitudes
faster than plaintext.
And I get peoples weekly report word docs that are 1Mb. Wow, my MB can hold 40 msgs?
Sample
Re: (Score:2)
remind me to recommend you to our competitors
Did you see Last night's episode of Bones on Fox ?
How do yo spell clueless geek Ans: "realistic dragon"
Re: (Score:2)
Aw, c'mon, there are many perfectly valid reasons for users to have 2 Gb in their mail folders. For instance, your company probably has a policy that workers shouldn't pornsurf on company time. So the typical user gets the memo about the new policy, and what's his obvious, reasonable reaction? "Yeah," he says to himself, "I really shouldn't be spending the
Re: (Score:2)
I'ts not just attachments - my personal email account holds over 500 megabytes of mostly text. (To be precise, the vast majority of emails are pure text; don't have numbers handy, but I think the majority of storage is taken up by text. Large emails or ones with Office attachments are rejected.) It also holds another couple gigs of spam/viruses I keep arou
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
That's kind of what I was thinking. I administrate a Lotus Domino server and we'd been using 200MB for years. Recently I cranked everyone up to 2GB. There are only about 60 of us, but even so it's not outrageous to build a system that can maintain that. Mirror it internally in the server and then replicate it offsite somewhere. Also use a 'shared mail' database for any duplicate messages sent to multiple recipients. To take it another step you could configure the server to delete attachments that are more
I don't *think* so (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
SOX requires your company to keep it around for something like 7 years, so deleting it out of your mailbox only denies *you* access to it.
op is half right (Score:3, Interesting)
2GB? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it obvious? (was:2GB?) (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Good initiative, poor judgement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I personally couldn't care less how much space I get on GMail; I love GMail for one very simple reason: conversations. There isn't a single mail program out there that has a feature that compares to it. Lumping all emails on a single topic together as in a single interactive page is the best way to retain context on an email thread. Instead of seventeen "re: Bob, have you seen t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
With Opera, those seventeen (to continue with my previous, totally arbitrary number) emails in a threaded view still take up seventeen lines in my inbox. With GMail, they're collapsed together as a single conversation, a single line in my inbox. Yeah, that's much better.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
That's the '05 Number, it was 87% in '06, and projected to break 90% in '07.
finally! (Score:4, Funny)
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?
Up yers MS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you need 2Gigs for company email? (Score:3, Interesting)
That and you should NOT have let them foward their email inthe firstplace (just disable the friken ability, it isn't that hard).
And how long (Score:2)
is it going to take me to fix a corrupt exchange database WHEN one of these goes corrupt?
The length of time it takes already makes it a toss up between restoring last nights backup and having things offline while it repairs itself...
And before anyone asks, yes I do have it split up.Gmail already has mail on the mobile (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do I get a feeling that the Microsoft version will only support Windows CE devices?
Wow - how inovative (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
kind of missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
You can tell this has nothing to do with reality (Score:2)
So you either need a nice fast link to another site (fast enough to handle all the replication) or you need to accept that in the event of a disaster, you've lost your email system permanently.
Assuming you have such a link, you have to hope that nobody ever gets disgruntled, or your nice shiny replica will merrily r
The Real Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2, Informative)
Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada (Score:4, Interesting)
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" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the lawyers are just a convenient scapegoat. As I understand it, they got mad at corporations for saying "we don't have that on our server" when asked for something old but damaging but the user being able to produce it from a .pst file when it's helpful. So the lawyers said you'd better always produce
or switch to Lotus Domino where 2GB is small (Score:2)
Competition (Score:2)
Replication != Backup (Score:2)
Backup/Restore feature, not GMail (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Wrong again, Thanks for the FUD (Score:2)
It can already do this. MS is suggesting that companies increase the limits put on users to avoid risky (and potentially illegal) mail dumping to a GMail account.
Slashdot: Now with more FUD!
Aside from this there is also the option of personal folders using Outlook. Much more secure than GMail or any other 3rd party mail servers.
I don't do this, but: (Score:2)
I'll worry about this when... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Eight-year-olds, Dude" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Use ELM (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
--nutz