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  • #2176157

    Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

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    by mandms7 ·

    We are a smaller credit union with approximately 80 users. We run Exchange 2000 in a Windows 2000 environment. I get lots of users complaining that they don’t have enough space in their mailbox. I’ve provided them instructions on how to archive, but most are simply too lazy to deal with it.

    We allocated 200,000 KB (200 megs) for mailbox storage, and I’m wondering what you allocate per mailbox? Am I being too stingy?

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    • #3348380

      good grief

      by cactus pete ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      I would LOVE to force everyone down to 200 MB. We have no limites – one mailbox is 9 GB. We have many over the 1 GB barrier…

      I always thought that 100 MB is plenty – so you’re not stingy at all in my book.

      • #3348083

        User Education

        by cactus pete ·

        In reply to good grief

        I am a little better rested now and can answer some more…

        One thing to do is to let the user know that a copy of everything they have ever sent is STILL in the “Sent Items” folder. Please delete this 🙂

        Then, have them delete everything in “Deleted Items” that is older than, say [arbitrarily] 2 months.

        Next, make it a competition.. Everyone who decreases their store by X MB or Y % gets seomthign from the company, and the top Z reductions gets yet some otehr prize.

        THEN put the limits on.

        • #3331829

          Charge them

          by jerry.orlando ·

          In reply to User Education

          I know this is a little late, but i just joined. I run a network of 5 departments, 3 companies and 400 people. Although everything is owned by one person, every department has a budget and IT charges each department based on their usuage.

          I put it to them this way. Everything has a cost associated with it. You want more storage space, then it’s going to cost your department more money. When i explained it this way to the owner and the VP’s, they all understood and agreed with it.

          For the general users: 20mb box limit and 5mb send/receive.

          For the VP’s and traveling sales people: 50mb box limit and 10mb send/receive.

          Although i still get the occasional gripes, it’s worked out very well. But then again, i do have upper management’s support. Hope this helps.

          jerry

    • #3348217

      Base it on job role and need

      by liame ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      If a user can demonstrate a need for more let em have it I say.

      If on the other hand the grunts just want more room for thier MP3’s and AVI’s when they should be working take their quota down if they complain!

    • #3348206

      Easy to fix this

      by amcol ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      No matter how small your organization nor how small your budget, good IT management practice is doing more with less. You’re doing the right thing limiting mailboxes, although to another poster’s point I think 100 mb is frankly more than enough.

      However, this is not an issue you want to make into a battle. The cost of storage is not worth even thinking about it, and if you do have a small organization then you’re not talking about a large number of users. Don’t grant a blanket increase to all users, but if anyone wants more storage let them have it.

      While you’re at it, put some controls in place. Have the “Deleted Items” folder automatically flushed every thirty days. It’s a best practice on a number of levels…it helps manage overall storage levels, and you don’t keep around documents that are discoverable any longer than necessary. Train your customers to use hyperlinks instead of sending attachments. That alone will control storage creep (or gallop). Train them also to avoid the use of the “Reply All” button, the single most evil invention in the history of western civilization. Between replying to everyone in the organization when only one person needs to know, and keeping large attachments associated with these enterprise-wide distributions, e-mail systems can dim the lights. You be responsible to your customers in terms of providing good service, but get them to take some responsibility for their own behavior as well.

    • #3348160

      email limits

      by afram ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      Originally there were no limits and a company of 55 people reached the 16 GB limit of email for standard exchange servers. I think the largest mailbox was 6GB. Of course, performance was slow and people complained like crazy that when they highlighted an email, it took 30 seconds to display it (GASP!)

      As we moved from exchange 5.5 to 2003, I moved the mailboxes one at a time after people archived enough of their emails. The threat was that the old server had to be shut off by a certain day, and if people didn’t archive by then, they would lose their email (idle threat, but effective).

      I gave everyone 80MB of storage before they got an automatic warning to clean their mailbox. If it exceeded 100MB, it prevented them from sending email. I told everyone that email could not be received if their mailbox exceeded 120MB (but I never really activated that limit).

      People complained like crazy that they absolutely had to have all 13 years of their email readily available at all times and that archiving was too confusing (even though it was scheduled to run automatically).

      When the president asked me about it, I told him I wasn’t going to work until 4am without compensation anymore to work on the mail server when there were problems, and suddenly he was happy to enforce the policy change.

    • #3348145

      Job role and awareness of mailboxes

      by erikpaladin ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      Based on the to possible sollutions above. I would like to combine them. First you need to get a profile of the users there are within this Server. Then give them limits of the Mb s of mail they can get. for instance a secretary less than a IT-manager and so on. Second give them a workshop/presentation on how to reduce the size mailboxes not only a mail how to do it. In the presentation let them see how it works and let them be more mail aware of sizes and help them to reduce the mail size. Do this with the knowledge of doing nothing wil only let to high access times in the mailbox itselves and you get another set of complaining users.

      Maybe let the user control a own local folder where some of his mails are inside reduces the waiting times.

    • #3348093

      Cost of managing space

      by jdmercha ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      Assuming that your are placing these limts out of cost considerations. The cost of adding space is cheaper than the cost of managing it, and responding to dissatisfied useres.

      On the other hand if you have technical issues, like the server can’t handle more drives, or the backup can’t handle that much data, then you need to place limits.

    • #3347873

      40MB!!!

      by hockeyist ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      In my last company, a multi-national project/consulting company with 14,000 users, we had an enforced allocation of 40MB per user. I had all sorts of un-necessary problems caused by this. The IT Director said that if the e-mail was important then it was to be “dragged to the appropriate project directory (yes, that’s right; out of the mail system into the file system!!). I got around this organised a CD burner for each pc locally and trained the users on PST file management/backup.

    • #3332669

      200 MB seems plenty generous

      by rexworld ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      Here at CNET, when we were on the old version of Exchange they enforced a stingy 50 MB limit. We’ve upgraded to I believe Exchange 2003 and with the upgrade they upped the online storage to 150 MB. So your 200 MB seems like plenty.

      It’s all about the attachments–people send so many big PDF files or Excel spreadsheets as attachments instead of just pointing everyone to a dropbox on the network. I’d say that’s where you can get a lot of breathing room–teach everyone how to use shared dropboxes on the network for sharing big files instead of sending them as attachments.

    • #3351640

      60 Megs

      by tsjohnson26 ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      For my firm we give them 60Mb mailbox and a 2 gig limit on personal folders.
      When I get a phone call, despite how many times you try to teach people, I tell them 1)empty deleted items, 2)either achive your sent items into their PF or delete them and 3)go through your inbox and weed through the emails in there.

    • #2991358
      Avatar photo

      Practice

      by kiran.maan ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      Is that users are on MAPI ?
      If Yes, can transfer it to POP3
      If it is POP3, can make practice not to keep copy of email on server for more than 3 days.

      You can play around easily.

    • #2991331

      PST files

      by mrtech40 ·

      In reply to Exchange-How Much Space Per Mailbox Do You Provide?

      I am sure users would like to keep many of those e-mails due to legal issues, I am also in finance. I use PST files for most users. PST files immediately download e-mails locally to the PC or anywhere else you want, perhaps a network drive. Note that PST files can be backed up if they are in use. Newer version of Outlook handle better the old space limitation of 2GB. If you send them to a network drive, you can back them up and scan for large sizes.

      Many admins don’t like this, but when you have large Organizations, having all the e-mails in the server can lead to corruption. I had to recover this twice and the best times I got was about 1 hour per GB.

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