Email Retention Policies

[AllenKass]

I am curious what kind of retention policy other businesses have in place for their email systems.

I'm interested in how long mail is allowed to be stored and how big individual mailboxes are allowed to become for those that have any restrictions in place. Currently we are at approx. 50% of our available hard drive space. It took approx. 2 years to get to this point.

If you do have restrictions in place, how often do you clean out the mailboxes and do you archive the messages that are going to be deleted.

Any suggestions would be helpful so we can develop a user friendly and administratable policy.

Thanks,
Allen

 

[AJ1982]

I work for a small accountancy firm (100 to 150 employees) and we employ a system of allocation per user.

Secs and Admin staff are allowed upto about 25Mb

Mgr and Senior Mgr in the reigon of 100Mb

Partners in the reigon of 200Mb!!!

Obviosuly, it is not possible to tell a partner what to do, thus two partners have around 750Mb in their boxes, each!!!

We have an e-mail scanner blocking incomming exe to control size. Outgoing files of a large size are parked or banned.

Hope this is of help

 

[labrooks]

We have a company of about 350 users. Currently we have set up 40MB limit for all users (no special privileges for higher-ups). We keep mail accounts for 30 days after they have been terminated.

 

[Zelandakh]

There is a new law going through (may be UK only) that you need to keep emails for 5 years. This is going to be a nightmare...

Here is a possible solution:

Create an archive.pst for each user. Set archive messages after 30 days. Put the archive file on their home directory on the server and create a folder called FILING. Train them on how to file their emails properly. If they do not file correctly, both Inbox and Sent Items are cleared to the archive file. This takes the load off Exchange for emails not accessed regularly but leaves things accessible and on the server.

Anyone in any position in the company only needs a small mailbox as most stuff will go to archive within a month and everyone is happy.

All mailboxes that are deleted can be cleared down to the archive folder for future use if required.

This should mean there is no requirement for Exchange to grow beyond about 100MB per user.

 

[Kbu]

I work for a fairly large Utility company and we have the following standards in place. Warnings at 20meg, no send at 30meg, Mailbox is locked at 35meg. About 2% of my users seem to have a problem with house cleaning. So far management has supported the standard. We explain how, and even setup a archive folder placing this on the users local PC. We explain that there is no backup and it's up to them to keep this file clean. In the cases where long term backups are needed we offer to burn users Archive folders to CD on a annual basis ( usually cost them a burger or such ). This works for about 3000+ users with average usage.