Hello Everybody, I was just wondering how various people and companies manage their mailboxes, do you just set a warning message in the mailbox get to a certain size. Anyone prohibit sending when the mailbox reaches a certain limit. How many of us archive off to PST instead of a bespoke Exchange archiving system. How do you keep a check on your mailbox size, and how many mailboxes do you have, both live and dormant. I would be interested to hear all of your views. Many thanks Pat

How big is your company? Users? Average mailbox size? Etc... I know how we do it at our company but it doesn't mean it's the right way to do it.

Here are the usual limits I will recommend to someone if they don't have a specific idea of what they need: Issue warning at 250MB Prohibit send at 275MB Prohibit Send and Receive 350MB I sometimes hear objects to the Prohibit Send and Receive limit, but I think it is important to set it so that a single mailbox does not fill up all available space. don't laugh, I have seen it happen several times.

When I walked into this new job, coming from a MUCH larger environment, I was stunned at the limits. At my old company we had around 20,000 mailboxes andit was segmented into normal and "Power/Exec" users. Normal users receive a warning at 190 MB, and a prohibit send at 200 MB. We did implement the prohibit send/receive (touchy subject), but we had that limit set to 300 MB. This was mainly to catch accounts that were abandoned by groups, and were not being maintained. Power/Exec users had larger limits. Everything was being archived using Legato e-mail extender, and to Virtual WORM drives for complaince. At the new job, they had a warning set at 20 MB, and a send at 25 MB! Why? Because the manager was a one time Unix "Send text Only" kind of guy. Funny thing is that they had tons of space, but was not using it. After about day 3 of people complaining about limits, I set the space the way I thought it should be, and then informed everyone of the changes. Everyone here was using PST files for archiving. This is such an unmanagable situation. Essepcially if the workstations are not being backed up. Lose a workstation, lose a year's worth of e-mail since everyone is to lazy to make a copy somewhere. What is funny also is the companyI am at now that had the small mailboxeswent from having 500 people to being owned by a company with 40,000 employees in the last few weeks. Now the environment is going back to how I am used to. Large clustered Exchange Servers with larger limits, but with EMC/Legato E-mail extender to archive off and create shortucts. Okay. I just realized I am babbling, so I will stop now. I was just trying to make the point that it all varies widely from company to company.

It's so interesting to hear how others handle mailbox limits. The company I'm at now has NO limits. It's so insane. We have over 2200 mailboxes with the average size being around 2.5GB (largest mailbox is currently at 43GB!). Even though everyone in my dept knows limits are paramount at this point we cannot get user by off by the corner offices. The point I'm trying to make is whatever you do make sure to start enforcing limits as soon as possible. The longer a company goes without them the more difficult it becomes to apply limits (it's a culture shock).

You could bring that 43 GB down to a couple of hundred MB with Email Extender... Not that I am pushing it.. But it does solve THAT problem. :-)

We're setting up Zantaz. Not sure if I'm sold on it but at least it's something...

We're planning an Exchange 2007 migration and want to cap the mailbox size. We haven't decided on a size limit yet so I'd be interested to find out what performance is like with a 2.5GB mailbox? Anyone have any feedback on supporting mailboxes this large?

Would definately look at some kind of archiving before upgrading to Exchange 2007 - do not let users have the facility to open or create PST files. We use Enterpsie vault the beauty of this system is it is almost transparent to the user, and it also does other forms of archiving such as Public Folders, Sharepoint and File Systems. It's not cheap but it's good. If you are going to Exhange 2007 youi will need Enterprise Vault 2007 - BTW this product is retailed by Symantec. As regards 2007 have you thought about how you are going to deploy it - are you going to have separtate servers for Mailbox's, transport endge and client access. Remember to consider your transport server specification as every email in your organisation will go through this. You need top have some idea's of your volumes of email and your SLA's as well as retention and destruction before thinking about the upgrade. Mailbox size maybe important as well as the media you keep your data on - not to mention your backup stratargy. Remember also you can not upgrade to Exchange 2007 you need to start off as this or introduce a 2007 box into your organisation. Thehardware and software need to be 64bit - also you support staff will need training as all ADadministration is done through Exchange rather than the AD MMC. Let us know what you decide.

At my previous employer, a 13 Branch community bank, we had a limit of 250MB per user. Of course there were one offs, like marketing, where they deal with large pictures, but in general most people adhered to this. If after we helped a user clean out their sent and deleted items they still had a lot of stuff they needed to keep, we would help them set up auto archive or manual archive to their backed up user space. This was a organization with 300 employees. We would keep track of the space used with a network monitoring tool that monitored Disk space. Mailbox size was not a huge issue. Issue warning at 200MB Prohibit send at 250MB Prohibit Send and Receive 250MB At my current employer, a hospital, we have over 2000 employees with 2300 mailboxes. I was hired to manage the Exchange environment after they migrated from Novel. With novel, they did not have a mailbox size limit, they had a retention limit based on time. anything over 6 months was deleted and you had to manually archive to an archive on your user space if you wanted to keep anything longer. Even though we say we don't have a size limit, I have set a prohibit sendlimit of 2GB on mailboxes just to keep people in check. We have an email archive system from EMC called EmailXtender that uses Exchange journaling and scheduled tasks to archive the data. We continue to delete emails after 6 months, but users are able to retrieve old mail from the archive system. The lawyers are still hashing out how long to keep the archvied email as it related to HIPAA. Since we want to control where email lives for compliance/discovery reasons, we've disabled the ability to use the autoarchive feature of outlook and don't even allow users to attach PST's. We used Group Polcicy to acheive this. With outlook 2007, it's pretty easy. Older Versions require a little more work. To keep track of mailbox sizes, I use a few methods. -One really good tool is here: http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2008/05/version-5-of-mailbox-size-gui-script.html. it's a custom script someone created that allows you to see the size of everyone's mailbox as well as dive into their mailbox and see their folder sizes to determine what folder has the most junk. -To make sure the mailbox Dataabases aren't growing out of control, I have a script that gathers the mailbox database sizes and then I subtract the empty space that shows up in the event log after the Information Store maintenance (again a script that used log parser to gather the InfoStore events and email them to me in a CSV. I also use this script to make sure the database maintenance is running properly). I pop all that into a spreadsheet and compare that week to wee to trend the growth. I hope this helpsBrian Kirby