Exchange Mailbox size

If you are running the standard version of exchange, you have only 16gigs available to the IS.

So by your account, the maximum number of users you can have is 8. Which is not feasible.

At this point you need to get your executives behind you. Get your first line VP in front of you and explain to him that the extraneously large mailbox sizes are going to cost the company money. If we can't get the mailboxes down to a reasonable size (300 megs max!), then we will need to buy a larger disk subsystem and the enterprise version of exchnage. Your looking at 20-30k min.

Once they agree to pair down users e-mail. You need to generate a nice e-mail, make it read receipt and important, explaing to your users what the new policy is and how we are going to get them down to size.

The first and most tedious task is exporting your users current mail to pst files, and then burning it cd. Obviously those users with 2 gigs will need mulitple pst files. Once their mail is exported, they can then begin clearing out their mailboxes. If they have to come in on a weekend, so be it.

Next, you need to go into your exchange admin, open up the servers, to the private info store, click properties and set up some limits. I set mine initially at 550 warning, 600 stop send. Never set the stop recieve.

Then over time, ween your users down to the 250/300 mark. I did 50 megs a month.

I hope this helps