What I do to keep older mail items including those with attachments is save them to a .pst file. For instance.. I made a .pst that contains all quotes I get from vendors for hardware. After I receive a quote I move it to this folder. I've made sure that the location of the pst is located in my share on the network so it gets backed up. I'm able to keep the size of my storage on the exchange server low while also maintaining stuff I need. Kim -----Original Message----- From: david [mailto:apba08@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 1:29 PM To: [ExchangeList] Subject: [exchangelist] RE: Mailbox Issues http://www.MSExchange.org/ If you can persuade your users to provide hyperlinks to files rather than attach the originals this will save space. Obviously not a universal solution but will help for groups with access to a common server for storage of work files. Regards David S. -----Original Message----- From: Chris Nielsen [mailto:cnielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 27 February 2003 01:04 To: [ExchangeList] Subject: [exchangelist] RE: Mailbox Issues http://www.MSExchange.org/ I've been mulling over the same type of situation. I have several users that are around 300MB in mailbox size, which IMO is too large. They are either not archiving, or they are saving large type files in their mailboxes (lots of .doc's, graphics or pdf's or something). Here are what I have determined are some good guidelines to follow and I have recommended to my users: * Your Deleted Items and Sent Items folders should be considered a main archive source, and hence anything that is not worth keeping should be shift-deleted (permanently deleted). Spam, and other worthless email should not go into your Deleted Items folder. You should shift-delete it. (Rule-of-thumb is, of course, to *not* permanently delete if you're in doubt.) * Attachments worth keeping should be saved to file and the email they came in on shift-deleted to save mailbox space (and therefore server performance). * Everyone should have auto-archive settings set somewhere between 3 and 6 months. Anything older than that gets moved to archive folders, which reside on the local machine and therefore don't have any impact on server performance. The goal of all the above is to maintain an optimal mailbox size below 250MB. This equates to 64 users per 16GB of server space. I have yet to actually place a hard limit on mailbox size as there are a few people that have gone through their mailbox deleting everything they can (so they say) and they are still at or above 300MB. Being as one of these is my boss I can't go limiting the mailbox sizes willy-nilly :-), if you get what I mean. Plus we have a rather low number of users on the system. We're nowhere near the 500 to 1000 users that is a typical load for a server. If we were higher in user count I would be looking at closer to 100MB per mailbox as a guideline myself. As it is, I'm not too worried about mailbox size as long as we stay close to 250MB top end. Your question about backups seems misguided. I'm unfamiliar with any specifics of running Exchange on SBS, but all Exchange data in the Information Stores should be backed up at the server level. This makes backing up at the user level superfluous. Once you get users using the archiving features of Outlook they will have a considerable amount of data in their archive folders, which will be in .pst (native Outlook) format, and these files should be backed up. But their online mailboxes should be taken care of at the server level. Does SBS not store mailboxes on the server? I've found the above policies to work fairly well for my application. I've been at my current job for just over two years and I myself maintain an online mailbox size just over 150MB and my archive.pst has just reached 135MB. I auto-archive anything older than 4 months. If anyone has suggestions or counter-points to anything I've said I'd be glad to hear them. I'm still pretty new at Exchange Administration. Chris Nielsen Systems Administrator New Dawn Technologies -----Original Message----- From: Michael Bonnice [mailto:whadmin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 5:06 PM To: [ExchangeList] Subject: [exchangelist] Mailbox Issues http://www.MSExchange.org/ Hi All, Im having some issues with peoples mailbox sizes, currently I have not placed any restrictions on mailbox sizes. Some peoples are up to 300mb and growing. As I am running exchange on SBS this is going to cause an issue down the road. Just wondering what a reasonable/average restriction is. Also the users will want to backup their mailboxes, is there an easy way to burn it onto CD or something, and what format should it be. Thanking all, Michael Bonnice