Many Exchange installations have “grown up” over
the years, while some administrators have planned their installations extremely
well from the beginning with options for every contingency. If you’re in this
second group, congratulations! If you’re in the first group, then you’ve had to
take some manual steps to get around various issues–welcome to the world of
e-mail administration.

In this article, I’ll talk about one issue in particular
that is sometimes “worked around” in an effort to provide quick
customer service or solve a problem, but that often becomes an administrative
nightmare down the line. The challenge: the ever-popular issue of e-mail
storage limits.

You probably know that you can set limits that are applied
to each user whose mailbox is inside an information store. You also probably
know that you can apply mail storage limits to each user individually–even
overriding the store’s global settings. When you start doing this for a lot of
users, you start to lose track of which limits belong to which users, and the
limits themselves become practically meaningless.

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If you’ve traditionally gone this route, now is the time to
wrangle these errant users, even if it means kicking them out of your primary
message store altogether. Rather than continue to create exceptions to the store
policy, keep the “main” mailbox store intact with its limit, and
create a second store with either an increased limit, or with no limit at all.
After all, if your CEO comes to you and says, “You won’t impose a limit on
my mail,” there’s not much you can do!

To create a new message store, go to the Exchange (2003)
System Manager:

  1. Click on Expand Servers |
    (your server name) | First Storage Group.
  2. Right-click First Storage
    Group.
  3. From the shortcut menu,
    choose New | Mailbox Store.
  4. If you want to accept all of
    the defaults, such as the database location, the public folder store that
    should be used, etc., all you really need to do is name the store. Use
    something descriptive like “Unlimited space”.
  5. Click OK once you make all of
    your selections.

After you create the store, you need to mount it by
right-clicking the new store and choosing Mount Store.