Policy! (Score 1)

Man, the problem with corporate America is that the packrat mentality doesn't stay at home. Can you imagine 1800 sq. feet of paper mail and packages in your house? 13 GB? What has he got in there, CD images? At that rate it might take days to restore. I hope nothing ever corrupts. Have you considered doing an offline defrag to get some space back? Do you delete user mailboxes of terminated employees?

First of all, you oughta mandate a file attachment limitation or lifetime of large files. Like, "no files over 20 MB" and if you do allow it "files over 20 MB will stay on the server only 10 days" so detach it and save it elsewhere. Second, if users know that things are going to get tossed after a certain period of time, they tend to print or save important messages. Say, one year's worth.

Third, I would look at management levels. For example, the receptionist does not necessarily need to keep mail forever, while the in-house attorney may need to. You can set up recipient policies to automatically clean up mailboxes of certain groups. Believe it or not, while you may get resistance to clean up policies, most employees in certain workgroups are thankful of it in the long run. You also have the option to turn off cleanup in certain folders, so it it's important, the user only has to move it to a folder.

It's just flat dangerous to keep mail forever. E-mail's primary function is to send and receive in a timely manner, not store. If you have to keep mail forever, consider pricy archival solutions like Archiveone or Veritas Enterprise Vault. KEYWORD: solution. But you gotta think about policy for archiving to do any good!

Have you considered donating a small prize like a bottle of champagne to the user who cleans up the most email? It's quite effective when you throw competition into it.