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To Network Admins - Exchange Mailbox Limits?

M

Mr Pickles

Diamond Member
Just doing a quick poll that doesn't really require a poll. What mailbox size limits do you impose on your customers? I work for a company that has recently aquired a handful of accounts, all with different network specifications. Its interesting to see the mailbox size limitations on some of the offices that have in house exchange environments. Here are some of them:

25 users - 10gig limit
120 users - No limit ( Enterprise Vault Archiving System )
100 users - No limit ( Global Relay Archiving System, which doesn't auto archive. )
6 users - 100 gig total for 10 customer package.

Whatcha got?
 
60 Users with no limit. Symantec Enterprise Vault archiving with 8-year retention policy on all mail. Our Journal mailbox is archived in almost real-time (once a minute), and User mailboxes are archived when items reach 6 months of age...which really has no impact on the size of our E-Vault storage due to data de-duplication.
 
The duplication is good. I'm (sort of) a fan of EV. I've used it for about three years across multiple environments but it has its downsides and innacuracies. Sometimes the client fails and people can't open extensions or at some points customers will open Outlook and be prompted for a domain user\pass. Most of these issues are from other things at play, such as backups putting the files "in use" on the server side, making them innacsessible. We've also had trouble splitting domains or changing domain settings during a migration or consolidation.

From a broad standpoint, whats your take on allowing users to have an unlimited amount of mail in their mailboxes? Some say it teaches the customer to not have to worry about mailbox organization. Of course there are some companies that have a retention policy and save everything, which is where archiving comes into play. But with systems like EV, pretty soon they end up with 15,000 emails (not really emails, more like 6 months of emails and then a lot of EV headers) in their inbox alone.

This may be fine for customers that have an archiving system, but what about users with no limits that don't have one? Should they be limited?
 
I'm not the exchange guy but:

Around 1,000 Mailboxes
Regular Users: 250MB
Customer Service Reps: 500MB
Supervisors/Domain Admins: 1GB

Using emailXtender for archiving, barracuda for spam filtering. Currently emails older than 1 year are archived. For the regular users they get an email warning at 80% capacity and cannot send email, at 100% capacity they cannot send or receive.

We do not support archiving locally (dumping to pst) for "in-house" users, sales force people do regularly archive on local storage.

There is also a process in place for users to request that their limit be increased whether temporary or permanent. I guess from my point of view we "get away with it" because we have no compliance requirements outside of HIPPA.
 
Nothinman said:
Hard drive space is that tight at your place?
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's pretty tight. It's a very small business with an even smaller IT budget. For example, we're still using Office '97 and have two Windows 2000 Servers, one of which having SQL 7 D:
 
kalrith said:
Yeah, it's pretty tight. It's a very small business with an even smaller IT budget. For example, we're still using Office '97 and have two Windows 2000 Servers, one of which having SQL 7 D:
Click to expand...

Then all I really have to say is that I'm glad I'm not you. =)
 
I work for a massive company (Think 100's of thousands of users). I don't work for the Exchange team but the limits are ~100mb. You can request an increase but its not easy.
 
I don't do the email system but we have about 15K accounts and the limit is 250MB. I think they are going to upgrade their systems in the next year or so to support 1GB max.
 
Originally Posted by kalrith
Yeah, it's pretty tight. It's a very small business with an even smaller IT budget. For example, we're still using Office '97 and have two Windows 2000 Servers, one of which having SQL 7

Then all I really have to say is that I'm glad I'm not you. =)


Hell,i will be him. I need a freakin job! lol
 
We have 100 users and a 500MB per user limit.
Backups using Backupexec Exchange agent take most of the night as it is, I can't imaging if we opened it up to 1GB per mailbox.
 
Nothinman said:
Wow, remind me never to work with you guys...
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FYI these "low" limits are generally recommended for very very good reasons.

First off, no matter what limit you set people will eventually have to go through and organize/archive stuff. Ever tried to get a user to archive 5-10gb of mail? It's impossible. They'll archive about 100mb at a time just to get mail flowing again, until it's full. Then another 200mb. Then it's full, so they'll mass-dump a bunch more emails not really understanding the process and end up losing crap.

In my opinion it usually makes the most sense to have a ~1gb mailbox size or less (at least, that's what I use and recommend for most situations).

Also HTF are you backing up 5-10gb mailboxes?
 
SpatiallyAware said:
FYI these "low" limits are generally recommended for very very good reasons.

First off, no matter what limit you set people will eventually have to go through and organize/archive stuff. Ever tried to get a user to archive 5-10gb of mail? It's impossible. They'll archive about 100mb at a time just to get mail flowing again, until it's full. Then another 200mb. Then it's full, so they'll mass-dump a bunch more emails not really understanding the process and end up losing crap.

In my opinion it usually makes the most sense to have a ~1gb mailbox size or less (at least, that's what I use and recommend for most situations).

Also HTF are you backing up 5-10gb mailboxes?
Click to expand...

:thumbsup: ALWAYS quota your users with reasonable quotas. A 10 GB quota is not "reasonable" by any stretch.
 
I work with clients that typically range between 10-250 users.

Normal Users: 2GB.
VIP's: "Unlimited" (usually about 10GB which I bump up if necessary)
 
SpatiallyAware said:
FYI these "low" limits are generally recommended for very very good reasons.

First off, no matter what limit you set people will eventually have to go through and organize/archive stuff. Ever tried to get a user to archive 5-10gb of mail? It's impossible. They'll archive about 100mb at a time just to get mail flowing again, until it's full. Then another 200mb. Then it's full, so they'll mass-dump a bunch more emails not really understanding the process and end up losing crap.

In my opinion it usually makes the most sense to have a ~1gb mailbox size or less (at least, that's what I use and recommend for most situations).

Also HTF are you backing up 5-10gb mailboxes?
Click to expand...

I would say the term "very good" is subjective. I like the Google approach. I'd much rather have my email available all of the time and indexed so I can find this quickly. And I trust our Exchange server more than I do my notebook's hard disk or myself to keep track of a dozen PST files.

As for backups, I'm honestly not sure how Backup Exec is configured or how long a backup takes to run for us.
 
Nothinman said:
I would say the term "very good" is subjective. I like the Google approach. I'd much rather have my email available all of the time and indexed so I can find this quickly. And I trust our Exchange server more than I do my notebook's hard disk or myself to keep track of a dozen PST files.

As for backups, I'm honestly not sure how Backup Exec is configured or how long a backup takes to run for us.
Click to expand...



Of course there are all kinds of crazy scenarios. I'm sure there are institutions out there with legitimate needs for an uncapped mailbox. However the "Google approach" is totally unrealistic in a business environment and I suspect that you're either desktop support or a user (I don't mean this in a jerkoff way, it's just a very "other side" sort of opinion)



Most companies function in some sort of "project" environment. A user works on a "project" and when the project is complete it is archived. That archived pst should be put in a network share with the rest of the project crap which is write protected after the job is complete. In your scenario, how do you get all of the emails for a project? Look up each team member and have them turn around and create a pst, then merge them all into one? You think that's easier than looking up a project folder and loading up the pst for whatever you need?


I'll have to spend some more time on this tonight.. I seriously cannot think of any business entity that would have a need for complete access to -all- email for -all- time. Eventually that mailbox will need sorted through, and it will be a HUGE pita to sort out 5-10gb worth of mail without losing track of anything.
 
Of course there are all kinds of crazy scenarios. I'm sure there are institutions out there with legitimate needs for an uncapped mailbox. However the "Google approach" is totally unrealistic in a business environment and I suspect that you're either desktop support or a user (I don't mean this in a jerkoff way, it's just a very "other side" sort of opinion)
Click to expand...

Your suspicions would be wrong. I haven't had a helpdesk level title in probably 8 years or so. While I do have to deal with helpdesk level calls more often than I'd like because I'm in the office a lot, I'm an engineer with a semi-small (~30 users) IT company that's main focus is on voice and infrastructure. I prefer to stay away from Windows as much as possible but I still end up getting drug into those projects too.

I just checked and our Exchange backups took ~3.75hrs and were ~112G last night.

Most companies function in some sort of "project" environment. A user works on a "project" and when the project is complete it is archived. That archived pst should be put in a network share with the rest of the project crap which is write protected after the job is complete. In your scenario, how do you get all of the emails for a project? Look up each team member and have them turn around and create a pst, then merge them all into one? You think that's easier than looking up a project folder and loading up the pst for whatever you need?
Click to expand...

Anything relevant to a project should be attached to that project in our system. Emails aren't handled in any special fashion.

I'll have to spend some more time on this tonight.. I seriously cannot think of any business entity that would have a need for complete access to -all- email for -all- time. Eventually that mailbox will need sorted through, and it will be a HUGE pita to sort out 5-10gb worth of mail without losing track of anything.
Click to expand...

I know most/all of the reasons for mailbox quotas. Keeping backups running within their alloted time-frames, Exchange database size limits, disk space in general, Exchange sucks in general, etc.

But I'm a pack rat so I'm looking at it from the opposite perspective, i.e. why should I have to worry about deleting email when it's the server's job to maintain that for me? The server is here to help me, not vice versa. And while I think unlimited should be possible, I know that doesn't really jive with reality. But some of the people here posting mailbox quotas of 150M are just insane. I'd be extremely pissed if I was given under 1G.
 
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