Limiting Exchange Mailbox Sizes

[LeonieCol]

Dear all,

I am implementing limits on the size of our exchange mailboxes. This is something that we did not have previously, so I thought it was about time.

I have (very generously, I thought) given users 500 MB each (more for certain staff like managers). However there have been one or two complaints from staff saying that this is not enough and that they need to keep emails in case they need to refer back to them at later dates. (I informed staff about the benefits of archiving and how easy it is, but this obviosuly falls on deaf ears).

I am not happy to increase the limits any more than this, and am interested to know what sort of limits other schools set their staff?

I know a lot of it can depend on hardware etc etc, but I am just keen to know what is considered a generous, reasonable mailbox size.

[webman]

100MB for staff at the moment and increase it as required. There are about 5 users who have a 1GB size. We use Zimbra for email though so we don't need to archive.

[srochford]

You really need have to have a policy for how long email is retained before you can set a sensible size limit. That needs to be agreed by senior management and then adhered to - good luck in making it happen :-)

While it's easy to archive, it's not always easy to work with archives (if you keep them on the C: drive, how do they get backed up? If you keep them on the network you are likely to have speed issues; Microsoft strongly recommend against using PSTs on network shares although this might not be that important for a static archive)

If you can get users to not have big attachments in email but to email links to files on shared drives then that will massively help to keep mailbox sizes down. Sharepoint may help in doing this (but it depends on the culture of your establishment); again, you need management buy-in for this to work well.

[FN-GM]

Do you use Outlook Web Access for home? If so can you open pst's in OWA?

Z

[srochford]

No - you can't work with PSTs except using Outlook - it's another reason to avoid them (they really are the work of the devil :-))

[spc-rocket]

You really need have to have a policy for how long email is retained before you can set a sensible size limit. That needs to be agreed by senior management and then adhered to - good luck in making it happen :-)

While it's easy to archive, it's not always easy to work with archives (if you keep them on the C: drive, how do they get backed up? If you keep them on the network you are likely to have speed issues; Microsoft strongly recommend against using PSTs on network shares although this might not be that important for a static archive)

If you can get users to not have big attachments in email but to email links to files on shared drives then that will massively help to keep mailbox sizes down. Sharepoint may help in doing this (but it depends on the culture of your establishment); again, you need management buy-in for this to work well.

I would have thought that enabling journaling would archive the emails comming and going out. This is how it works in Exchange 2007, one just enables journaling on the Transport section and it takes care of the rest. For speed and storage purposes it is recommended to store the journaling in a seperate disks or a location on network or another LUN on SAN.

Ash.

[srochford]

Unless I've misunderstood it, journalling is about letting the system manager keep a record of all (or some) emails moved through the system. It doesn't give the user a way of keeping hold of their emails so that they can go back and pick up something they sent/received 12 months or more ago.

There are archiving systems which do work centrally - essentially, the user still sees all their email in Outlook but the older messages are moved out of the Exchange store and into (say) a SQL database