Exchange mailbox limits..

[jbob]

We are going to be enforcing mailbox limits for all of our mailboxes in the next month. We are a non-profit social services organization with 600+ email accounts. We already have in place rules to delete deleted items older that one month and sent items older than 90 days. We are going to be setting a 100 meg limit on inbox, warning at 75 meg and stopping send at 100 meg. We really don't use email to send large files like spreadsheets or pdf's or anything like that. We have an intranet set up for stuff like that. a few of the users are over the limit now. We helped them clean up their mailbox to within limits and within a day, they were back over the limit. What are you admins doing for archiving so the users will have access to older stuff if they need it?

 

[KLin]

pst files.

 

[jbob]

I might also need to ad that we are in a Citrix environment and we use Wyse winterms, so no local hard drive. We do have another server that stores home folders, but if we create a pst file on their home folder isn't that kind of defeating the purpose of reducing inbox file sizes. We would just be moving that data from one server to another, what's the difference?

 

[spherrod]

Create PST files and archive them to CD/DVD?

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: spherrod
Create PST files and archive them to CD/DVD?

:thumbsup:

 

[jbob]

That sounds like alot of work for 600 mailboxes. Knowing some of the people here, they will insist on instant access also.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: jbob
I might also need to ad that we are in a Citrix environment and we use Wyse winterms, so no local hard drive. We do have another server that stores home folders, but if we create a pst file on their home folder isn't that kind of defeating the purpose of reducing inbox file sizes. We would just be moving that data from one server to another, what's the difference?

The difference is that your exchange server won't be brought to its knees. You can setup the individual Outlook clients to read the archive PST directly off of the home folder. Your users can still access their old email, and Exchange will run much better.

 

[spherrod]

Originally posted by: jbob
That sounds like alot of work for 600 mailboxes. Knowing some of the people here, they will insist on instant access also.

Very few people would need instant access in my experience - we've made an effort to make our users conscious of how much server capacity costs if we need to increase it and this has resulted in much smaller mailboxes. A lot of your users would accept keeping their archived mails on CD.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: jbob
That sounds like alot of work for 600 mailboxes. Knowing some of the people here, they will insist on instant access also.

Then tell them to stop using their Email as document storage. Where I used to work we had users with 2GB+ of data in their Email stores. Everyone felt they had to save each and every message they ever sent, received, or deleted to trash and the reason was always for a "CYA situation". Even creating .pst's wasn't a solution because they were too big and would eventually become corrupted.

 

[jbob]

Thanks for the input. I will take this info into account.

 

[Czar]

I think there is a program from microsoft called exmerge, or something like that

with that program I think you can archive mail on the server, take one mailbox and move old mail to a pst file

 

[alent1234]

i manage around 1000 mailboxes

currently we do a brick level backup, but we are going to be stopping it soon. I'm going to install Exchange 2003 trial version and do the storage group recovery feature. When it expires I'm going to reinstall as needed.