Re: Mailbox Sizes

  • From: Danny <nocmonkey@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "[ExchangeList]" <exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 11:55:00 -0500

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 11:29:09 -0500, Lloyd Williams
<williams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  http://www.MSExchange.org/
>  
> Are there any accepted best practices out there for the limits of Mailboxes
> sizes. 
> Most of our users have 100-200 MB mailboxes. I have a couple of users who
> claim to need 1-2 GB mailboxes. Is there any technological down side to
> allowing this size mail box. In addition it would seem that we will need to
> upgrade to the enterprise version of exchange 2003 to accommodate this (our
> total mail store size would be too close to 16GB  for comfort). Are there
> any issues associated with the switch to enterprise 2003 

1) My research shows the industry average was around 100MB. However,
ours is a bit above that, especially users who receive large PDF's on
a regular basis.

2) Teach users how to properly manage their mailboxes with the Mailbox
Cleanup Tool for example. This is not a one time thing, either. Make
it a monthly activity.

3) Their mailboxes are designed to store email, not attachments or
files; that's what file
systems are for. Have your users remove and save their attachments
(making a note as to where the attachment is) to a mapped drive on the
server, where they should be storing their files.

4) You would be surprised how much space joke emails take up,
specifically the ones with dozens of images and movies attached. They
should be removed from the server immediately, unless your
organization wants to pay for that extra storage.

-My research shows the average email message is 3.5KB in size, so
based on that with 75MB of email stored on the server, you would have
room for over 21,000 email messages.

-I have users with 100's of huge (8MB +) attachments. These are
killing their mailbox quota, so I educate them on how to store these
files to the file system, rather than the email system.

-A Microsoft employee working in the Exchange department, was asked
approx. how long to restore large DB's, and they responded something
along the lines of... For every GB of data (1024 MB) it adds APPROX. 1
hour to the time it would take to restore the system after a software
or hardware failure. So, these users who insist they need massive
mailboxes, they can explain to the President and management why they
are not able to access their email for several more hours during a
system failure.

I could ramble on, but I think you get my point.

...D


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