random IT bitching: I really hate that nobody gives a Sh17 about mailbox sizes

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: pontifex

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Yeah, mines 25. You end up hitting your max, deleting everything and starting fresh. Several times I've been looking for an old correspondence to find that I deleted it. Oh well, shoulda gave me a bigger box.

We have a 1 gb limit on our .pst file. I find that that's good for about 6 months worth of archives. When I run over the limit, I go in and delete the oldest emails until I'm back under. I can't take the time to sift through thousands of emails and figure out which ones might be important.

Last month we found out that our company was getting sued (no big deal, it's fairly common in my industry), our office of general counsel sent lawyers to talk to us and they told us not to delete any e-mails related to XXX lawsuit. Then they asked if any of us had received emails that would be considered relevant. I told them that I had, but I deleted them because the company forced me to.

That a tightly regulated, highly scrutinized company would force it's employees to delete emails just blows my mind. Penny wise and pound foolish.

you do know you can create multiple pst files and have them open in outlook?
i had one pst file that i called YEAR 2007 and before I got laid off, i was going to name my current one YEAR 2008 and start a new one. I could have all 3 open at the same time and look at any emails in either of them at the click of a mouse.

That's such a depressing bit of wisdom Hope you find another job

As for local pst's unless you are committing a crime, it is a liability to keep so much corporate data floating around. I'd rather have them in the DC/server room / server floor under physical security and encrypted or at the offsite facility with even better security, than on a users easily hackable XP machine...god forbid they are using some P2P app and are also using FAT32....

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Descartes
I have no idea how much I use and I don't care. If I get hassled about my mailbox size we're going to have problems. As it is, I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to ask for permission.

Limiting mailbox size is a productivity killer. Like I said - storage is cheap and the productivity gains far outweigh the cost.

In defense of the IT Nazis, it's not just the storage that's the problem. All of that e-mail still needs to be backed up, and it gets harder to meet backup SLA guidelines when you have a few TB worth of company e-mail to archive.

Sure, you can get faster backup servers and more bandwidth to fix that... but those AREN'T cheap.

My last company had great horror stories about how the 60TB daily snapshots barely ran into each other on the way to tape....

 

[Tsaico]

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Yeah, mines 25. You end up hitting your max, deleting everything and starting fresh. Several times I've been looking for an old correspondence to find that I deleted it. Oh well, shoulda gave me a bigger box.

We have a 1 gb limit on our .pst file. I find that that's good for about 6 months worth of archives. When I run over the limit, I go in and delete the oldest emails until I'm back under. I can't take the time to sift through thousands of emails and figure out which ones might be important.

Last month we found out that our company was getting sued (no big deal, it's fairly common in my industry), our office of general counsel sent lawyers to talk to us and they told us not to delete any e-mails related to XXX lawsuit. Then they asked if any of us had received emails that would be considered relevant. I told them that I had, but I deleted them because the company forced me to.

That a tightly regulated, highly scrutinized company would force it's employees to delete emails just blows my mind. Penny wise and pound foolish.

That argument goes both ways, it can be both expensive and time consuming if you have huge emails that never get dealt with. When your company gets sued, all it's email database must be turned over for evidence. This also includes any back ups that you have, and chances are, your company does it at least once a day and stores those for a few days or even months, and perhaps years. All that must be sifted through by others to make sure you are not omitting any potential evidence.

What worse, there are some cases that have created precident that if you had done business with a public entity, that information is now public access. Most of these are not a "only pertinent information" but rather the whole thing. Here is an article about what happened to Enron and their database...Eron's email goes public.


Here is some stuff that make arguments for setting up policies that keep email limited in history or even size.

Email as a liability
More liabilties with those silly emails...

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: IcebergSlim

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: IcebergSlim
its your job to give a business justification for setting IT policies. do your job.

technically it is not my job at all but that is exactly what I do.

Most of what I do (<90%) is not part of my job description

<--focused on policy

calculate the yearly cost to the company for having unlimited email storage. provide a cost saving solution. If they choose to still be ridiculous then so be it at least you tried.

Basically. I try to do be analytical and proactive as much as possible.

 

[imported_Devine]

Try a 20mb mailbox If I didnt have a pst my mailbox would be full at least every week.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Descartes
I have no idea how much I use and I don't care. If I get hassled about my mailbox size we're going to have problems. As it is, I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to ask for permission.

Limiting mailbox size is a productivity killer. Like I said - storage is cheap and the productivity gains far outweigh the cost.

In defense of the IT Nazis, it's not just the storage that's the problem. All of that e-mail still needs to be backed up, and it gets harder to meet backup SLA guidelines when you have a few TB worth of company e-mail to archive.

Sure, you can get faster backup servers and more bandwidth to fix that... but those AREN'T cheap.

Then IT is doing it wrong. Sorry, there is no excuse for not having sound backups and growing storage needs is no excuse. Storage grows similar to moores law. It's no secret that storage grows roughly double every two years. It's also no surprise that technology exists to meet that need.

 

[finite automaton]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Why is it rotten? It's not up to the company to keep a complete history of a users e-mail. Just enough for a buffer. Each user creates a PST + rules setup in outlook so email is automatically put in local folder = win

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: Tsaico

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Yeah, mines 25. You end up hitting your max, deleting everything and starting fresh. Several times I've been looking for an old correspondence to find that I deleted it. Oh well, shoulda gave me a bigger box.

We have a 1 gb limit on our .pst file. I find that that's good for about 6 months worth of archives. When I run over the limit, I go in and delete the oldest emails until I'm back under. I can't take the time to sift through thousands of emails and figure out which ones might be important.

Last month we found out that our company was getting sued (no big deal, it's fairly common in my industry), our office of general counsel sent lawyers to talk to us and they told us not to delete any e-mails related to XXX lawsuit. Then they asked if any of us had received emails that would be considered relevant. I told them that I had, but I deleted them because the company forced me to.

That a tightly regulated, highly scrutinized company would force it's employees to delete emails just blows my mind. Penny wise and pound foolish.

That argument goes both ways, it can be both expensive and time consuming if you have huge emails that never get dealt with. When your company gets sued, all it's email database must be turned over for evidence. This also includes any back ups that you have, and chances are, your company does it at least once a day and stores those for a few days or even months, and perhaps years. All that must be sifted through by others to make sure you are not omitting any potential evidence.

What worse, there are some cases that have created precident that if you had done business with a public entity, that information is now public access. Most of these are not a "only pertinent information" but rather the whole thing. Here is an article about what happened to Enron and their database...Eron's email goes public.


Here is some stuff that make arguments for setting up policies that keep email limited in history or even size.

Email as a liability
More liabilties with those silly emails...

the key is to have a policy that is agreed upon and to follow it to a T. It not ony gives you something to point at (I love pointing) when people are trying to maul you with their self-loathing but also saves your ass when the fan gets dirty. Just try to be as ready as you'll ever be all the time.

 

[Joemonkey]

get Legal involved, have them create a retention policy (say 18 months) and have emails older than the retention policy automatically deleted. People will quickly get the idea that they need to simply save off needed attachments and PDF any email threads they'll ever need to re-read in the future.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: ultimatebob

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Descartes
I have no idea how much I use and I don't care. If I get hassled about my mailbox size we're going to have problems. As it is, I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to ask for permission.

Limiting mailbox size is a productivity killer. Like I said - storage is cheap and the productivity gains far outweigh the cost.

In defense of the IT Nazis, it's not just the storage that's the problem. All of that e-mail still needs to be backed up, and it gets harder to meet backup SLA guidelines when you have a few TB worth of company e-mail to archive.

Sure, you can get faster backup servers and more bandwidth to fix that... but those AREN'T cheap.

Then IT is doing it wrong. Sorry, there is no excuse for not having sound backups and growing storage needs is no excuse. Storage grows similar to moores law. It's no secret that storage grows roughly double every two years. It's also no surprise that technology exists to meet that need.

Aye, but it is also the responsibility of the IT staff to expect but not accept the inefficiencies in the system and work to correct them as much as possible. There is a legitimate argument for increase in capacity and whatnot, but there are many more bullsh!t reasons as well. The key is to figure out where to draw a line in the sand and where you will not and to expect the expected but not depend on it.

Originally posted by: finite automaton

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Why is it rotten? It's not up to the company to keep a complete history of a users e-mail. Just enough for a buffer. Each user creates a PST + rules setup in outlook so email is automatically put in local folder = win

Unless they acutally need something from 3.5 weeks (usually some random time) ago ALL THE TIME.

 

[Blackjack200]

Originally posted by: Tsaico

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Yeah, mines 25. You end up hitting your max, deleting everything and starting fresh. Several times I've been looking for an old correspondence to find that I deleted it. Oh well, shoulda gave me a bigger box.

We have a 1 gb limit on our .pst file. I find that that's good for about 6 months worth of archives. When I run over the limit, I go in and delete the oldest emails until I'm back under. I can't take the time to sift through thousands of emails and figure out which ones might be important.

Last month we found out that our company was getting sued (no big deal, it's fairly common in my industry), our office of general counsel sent lawyers to talk to us and they told us not to delete any e-mails related to XXX lawsuit. Then they asked if any of us had received emails that would be considered relevant. I told them that I had, but I deleted them because the company forced me to.

That a tightly regulated, highly scrutinized company would force it's employees to delete emails just blows my mind. Penny wise and pound foolish.

That argument goes both ways, it can be both expensive and time consuming if you have huge emails that never get dealt with. When your company gets sued, all it's email database must be turned over for evidence. This also includes any back ups that you have, and chances are, your company does it at least once a day and stores those for a few days or even months, and perhaps years. All that must be sifted through by others to make sure you are not omitting any potential evidence.

What worse, there are some cases that have created precident that if you had done business with a public entity, that information is now public access. Most of these are not a "only pertinent information" but rather the whole thing. Here is an article about what happened to Enron and their database...Eron's email goes public.


Here is some stuff that make arguments for setting up policies that keep email limited in history or even size.

Email as a liability
More liabilties with those silly emails...

I've heard those kinds of arguments but I think they don't apply as much in my industry. We have robust policies governing our behavior (at a corporate level) that are designed specifically to defeat lawsuits like the one we're facing. I would think that the business prefers a nefarious email to be exposed and revealed to our counsel ahead of time so it can be dealt with as opposed to getting blindsided by the same communication in court.

Additionally, we need access to old emails for business reasons. I negotiate contracts with strategic business partners, and if I can dig up communications we had 4 years ago it can actually give me huge leverage over the counter-party.

Anyhow, that's just my opinion. It seems like our IT people don't feel the same way.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: Joemonkey
get Legal involved, have them create a retention policy (say 18 months) and have emails older than the retention policy automatically deleted. People will quickly get the idea that they need to simply save off needed attachments and PDF any email threads they'll ever need to re-read in the future.

That is what I am trained to do, but in many cases it will hurt productivity. My goal is to keep productity high, and likewise, system performance. They key is to formulate a policy that respects what is required for productivity and required to provide the performance that makes that productivity possible. It's a give and take that, if implemented in a B&W fashion only hurts the company. I get legal involved but I do so to defend the legitimacy of the viewpoints of each party, not to unilaterally impose the views on one on the other.

Put it this way: my last company existed for the sake of the documentation and dissemination of the knowledge that the world has about nature. it's very hard to put a limit on that (60TB shapshots, uhem, and that was not all their data), but they found a way that was amicable to both the content producers and content keepers...amicable enough anyways

now waht th3....*looks at his watch*

why the fvk am I talkign about work right now

*log's off and grabs a beer*

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: Tsaico

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Yeah, mines 25. You end up hitting your max, deleting everything and starting fresh. Several times I've been looking for an old correspondence to find that I deleted it. Oh well, shoulda gave me a bigger box.

We have a 1 gb limit on our .pst file. I find that that's good for about 6 months worth of archives. When I run over the limit, I go in and delete the oldest emails until I'm back under. I can't take the time to sift through thousands of emails and figure out which ones might be important.

Last month we found out that our company was getting sued (no big deal, it's fairly common in my industry), our office of general counsel sent lawyers to talk to us and they told us not to delete any e-mails related to XXX lawsuit. Then they asked if any of us had received emails that would be considered relevant. I told them that I had, but I deleted them because the company forced me to.

That a tightly regulated, highly scrutinized company would force it's employees to delete emails just blows my mind. Penny wise and pound foolish.

That argument goes both ways, it can be both expensive and time consuming if you have huge emails that never get dealt with. When your company gets sued, all it's email database must be turned over for evidence. This also includes any back ups that you have, and chances are, your company does it at least once a day and stores those for a few days or even months, and perhaps years. All that must be sifted through by others to make sure you are not omitting any potential evidence.

What worse, there are some cases that have created precident that if you had done business with a public entity, that information is now public access. Most of these are not a "only pertinent information" but rather the whole thing. Here is an article about what happened to Enron and their database...Eron's email goes public.


Here is some stuff that make arguments for setting up policies that keep email limited in history or even size.

Email as a liability
More liabilties with those silly emails...

I've heard those kinds of arguments but I think they don't apply as much in my industry. We have robust policies governing our behavior (at a corporate level) that are designed specifically to defeat lawsuits like the one we're facing. I would think that the business prefers a nefarious email to be exposed and revealed to our counsel ahead of time so it can be dealt with as opposed to getting blindsided by the same communication in court.

Additionally, we need access to old emails for business reasons. I negotiate contracts with strategic business partners, and if I can dig up communications we had 4 years ago it can actually give me huge leverage over the counter-party.

Anyhow, that's just my opinion. It seems like our IT people don't feel the same way.

there are those out there that understand

 

[Blackjack200]

Originally posted by: pontifex

Originally posted by: Blackjack200

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
5 GB?!? Wow. Most places block the sending of outgoing mail if you go over 200 MB!

I used to work at a place that had a 25MB quota. What a rotten thing that policy was.

Yeah, mines 25. You end up hitting your max, deleting everything and starting fresh. Several times I've been looking for an old correspondence to find that I deleted it. Oh well, shoulda gave me a bigger box.

We have a 1 gb limit on our .pst file. I find that that's good for about 6 months worth of archives. When I run over the limit, I go in and delete the oldest emails until I'm back under. I can't take the time to sift through thousands of emails and figure out which ones might be important.

Last month we found out that our company was getting sued (no big deal, it's fairly common in my industry), our office of general counsel sent lawyers to talk to us and they told us not to delete any e-mails related to XXX lawsuit. Then they asked if any of us had received emails that would be considered relevant. I told them that I had, but I deleted them because the company forced me to.

That a tightly regulated, highly scrutinized company would force it's employees to delete emails just blows my mind. Penny wise and pound foolish.

you do know you can create multiple pst files and have them open in outlook?
i had one pst file that i called YEAR 2007 and before I got laid off, i was going to name my current one YEAR 2008 and start a new one. I could have all 3 open at the same time and look at any emails in either of them at the click of a mouse.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Everyone gets 1 GB of network drive storage. My 1 GB is almost entirely taken up by my .pst file.

 

[evident]

5gb? my place only allows 100 mb. i spend half my day deleting shit from my mail. i can't fucking stand it

 

[Gunslinger08]

I haven't looked at my mailbox size lately, but I probably have 50,000 emails. Quite a few of those have attachments of several megs.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: joshsquall
I haven't looked at my mailbox size lately, but I probably have 50,000 emails. Quite a few of those have attachments of several megs.

*makes a cross with his index fingers and starts hissing*

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: joshsquall
I haven't looked at my mailbox size lately, but I probably have 50,000 emails. Quite a few of those have attachments of several megs.

*makes a cross with his index fingers and starts hissing*

Haha. I'm a service based web developer that works on several hundred client sites. Sometimes I need those random emails from 3 years ago and I don't have time to load up local archives.

 

[bignateyk]

5 gb?? I've been using gmail for several years now without deleting a thing (and it is a collect-all for like 4 different accounts) and I have only used like 500 megs.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: Joemonkey
get Legal involved, have them create a retention policy (say 18 months) and have emails older than the retention policy automatically deleted. People will quickly get the idea that they need to simply save off needed attachments and PDF any email threads they'll ever need to re-read in the future.

That is what I am trained to do, but in many cases it will hurt productivity. My goal is to keep productity high, and likewise, system performance. They key is to formulate a policy that respects what is required for productivity and required to provide the performance that makes that productivity possible. It's a give and take that, if implemented in a B&W fashion only hurts the company. I get legal involved but I do so to defend the legitimacy of the viewpoints of each party, not to unilaterally impose the views on one on the other.

Put it this way: my last company existed for the sake of the documentation and dissemination of the knowledge that the world has about nature. it's very hard to put a limit on that (60TB shapshots, uhem, and that was not all their data), but they found a way that was amicable to both the content producers and content keepers...amicable enough anyways

now waht th3....*looks at his watch*

why the fvk am I talkign about work right now

*log's off and grabs a beer*

then the next step is to get a SOX auditor involved and ask what they think your policy should be

 

[jiggahertz]

In 6 years of work at 2 companies, I have never deleted a corporate email.

 

[lupi]

I get warnings at like 16mb, now that's a joke.

 

[KevinCU]

Originally posted by: bignateyk
5 gb?? I've been using gmail for several years now without deleting a thing (and it is a collect-all for like 4 different accounts) and I have only used like 500 megs.

This.

I've been using gmail since October 2004 and I have only used 571MB of my ~7GB.

 

[jman19]

My mailbox at work is constantly full... damn quota.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: ironwing
Buy another drive, end problem.

Not been in IT long I take it?