Exchange 5.5 Information store size/Mailbox size limits

[SaleenWRX]

Hello all,
I am looking for some help/information

My users are pack rats and store EVERYTHING in email

I have tried to impliment limits - but i am always told - I need everything

I am trying to get some info toghter that will support me in Strictly inforcing mail box size limits

So i need to here what your Information store size is, mail box limits, and number of users

Here is how I have it set up - I think I am being more then Generous and well over the industry standards - Please let me know...

Exchange 5.5 standard- 110 Users
Privite store size currently 9.98GIG - on a 46.8GIG drive
Limits
200000K - Warning
400000K - Prohibit send
500000K - Disable mailbox

Currently I have 10 users over 300000K and 9 users over 200000K

These users cried to the CFO and I was TOLD to give them more space - So I set up personal folders for each one

Now they are all over 500MB on their personal folders and some in the 900MB range - the personal folders are stored on their private network share's

Again they are crying for more space - even though they have junk in their Personal folders and Inboxes that they can remove - they say they do not have time.

And my BU times have Tripled, Their Personal shares are growing in excess of 1GIG a month

The Private store grew 2gig's in 5 weeks

As you can see I need to control this growth - So I need data to show that my limits are Reasonable and DATA and Mail storage and clean up IS PART OF THEIR JOB!!

 

[Robnhood]

Assuming you don't have the enterprise version of exchange:

There is a 16 GB Software limit until to upgrade to enterprise.

and I am not sabout the cost of upgrading to the enterprise version. Craig

http://www.SecurelySpeaking.com

 

[fuego007]

For starters, most Exchange admins would never allow mailbox sizes of 200MB, let alone 500MB - especially with the standard version of Exchange.

What you could do is enable the auto-archive function in Outlook for each of these users. This can be configured by going to the 'Tools' menu, selecting 'Options', and clicking on the 'Other' tab. The settings allow you to specify the location of the pst and other options. I recommend you uncheck the 'Prompt before autoarchive' box. This way the user won't have a choice (unless they change the settings themselves).

Bob

 

[makai]

Tell the powers that be what you have told us. My environment is set to warning at 70mb, prohibit at 80mb. 400 users. More than enough room. Most of it will be attachments. Users are notoriously lazy.

As for large personal folders, inform them that they do not get backed up as they are on the local hard drive. Therefore a crashed PC would result in loss of their 'precious' data.

Put your point across. If they want no limits then more space in the long run is going to cost them more money. If the powers that be dont respect your opinion about how to run your network, either wait until a major problem with space arrises (which shouldnt be too long) or find another job where you are allowed to carry out your duties in the correct manner.

 

[SaleenWRX]

Thanks for the info and support guys

We are a small company - only 115 users

My CIO totaly argree's with me

The problem is HIS boss

Totaly ignores anything IT

Bascily agree's to limts - then when a user reaches the limits - tells us to remove them because the user has to do their Job

Ignoring the fact that for the past 2 months these users have been recieving warning messages and ignoring them

It makes my job all but impossable

PLEASE keep posting info and what ever else you feel could help me take this issue to the Big boss and SHOW him that we are NOT doing things correctly
IE - our store is to bog, our limits are too high, and users JOB must included proper data managment.

BTW - the ONLY reason I have been told why the can NOT clean their mailboxes and manage their server data is

I DONT HAVE ENOUGHT TIME!!

 

[CSCKone]

Welcome to the world of politics.

I have 100mb limits set up on the servers (5), with 1600 mailboxes total.

50 users "require" more space due to "time constraints" and just too much mail. 3 users alone account for almost 10% of all Exchange space taken up (1.8, 1.7 and 2.2gb mailboxes) Management is unwilling to set hard limits to not rock the boat.

The real problem now is the PSTs. They account for over 50% of the drive usage on the home directory servers, as everyone has to have every single piece of mail they have ever received. Corrupted PSTs are now a weekly occurance as they hit 1.4-2 gb.

Anyone have any suggestions for any type of Exchange archiving software to go along with this thread? I've seen some stuff out there, but does anyone have any suggested ones?

 

[Imashe]

Just a thought on email retention - does your company have a data retention policy? If not, is management aware of the potential "cost" of allowing those employees to keep all emails? Show them an article on the discovery process when being sued....that might shake them back into reality and give them a different perspective on setting mailbox limits! Here is one I found interesting:

http://www.sans.org/rr/backup/retention.php

Incidentally, I am in the same boat, trying to get management buy in to setting mailbox limits. We do not have a data retention policy yet, but it is driving getting the limits set, which is absolutely necessary in an Exchange 5.5 non-enterprise environment. But why is it that management always seems to want to put the cart before the horse and skip the planning stage?

 

[30362]

KCOWENS, great post on the data retention policy from SANS. I used this in my arguments to management.

I was recently in the same boat as SaleenWRX, our mail users are getting out of hand and management doesn't see this as a problem, however they are extremely sensitive when it comes to cost-control.

My solution was the following:

Based on current disk utilization metrics on both my fileservers and mailservers I was able to project that within 9 months the space on the mailserver would be inadequate (Microsoft says always leave 2x your PRIV.EDB free) and that the server can no longer be upgraded (out of drive slots) without replacing all the drives in the array with larger drives or buying a new server altogether. I then gave the costs of both options along with the time required to do the swap and the amount of system downtime required, added to that the fact that none of my other projects could be halted to do this and therefore we would have to bring in a consultant (although I would NEVER do that) and gave the hourly rate of a consultant...

Guess what, we now have policies. Took a whole 3 days to get all of management to agree. We are 5 servers and 600+ users, we now warn at 250 and prohibit at 300. There are a few exceptions, but nobody is allowed to have any PST on their local drive or the server and we purge DELETED and SENT every Sunday AM. The PRIV has stayed roughly the same for almost 2 months now (within a gig, as opposed to 1 gig every 3 weeks), and I am sure if I do a offline defrag I will get a bunch of space back.

Good Luck!!

 

[rainbow80]

Hi everyone,

I also have a problem with limiting the mailbox sizes for each user. Could any experts tell me how do we limit the user mailbox size on the exchange server. What's the steps or procedures we need to do.

Thanks a lot.

 

[smlull]

Okay, I'm the new guy, but here goes. We've just moved 1500 users from ccmail to exchange 5.5/outlook 2000. Across the board, 40meg mailbox gets the warning, 50 meg stops the send process. I've had a handful of users having issues, but they would have issues breathing if it wasn't for the instructions. I've only had to increase 2 mailboxes for just a couple of days, and they are back to manageable size. I did find that if I got a couple of higher ups to start bragging that they could manager their mailboxes and keep them clean, the others slowly fell in line. Another reason was the email retention days. Our legal department has decided that 60 days is the max we are holding tapes before we recycle them, that's okay but the mailboxes could hold years of email if they never go over the limit, or just merely delete the spam.

Anyway, just a new guy like I said.
Scott

 

[Segfault666]

User and Golf are both 4 letter words. Can you think of more?

Yea, I manage the IT Department for an engineering firm with about 120mail boxes. I have enforced limits many times but yet users whine, and complain that their mailboxes can't hold enough information. Our average mailbox size is 350MB with some users upwards of 1gb. I just kicked in a users teeth after she crossed 2GB. I have started archiving the massive mailboxes myself. And you know; since I have to do about 30 of them, I do them by year. (Yay for March!). I just dump it all into PST files and let the users sort it out.

The problem with PST files is that mS does not recommend that they be more than 150mb or corruption issues can arise. Ahwell. It's not my mail. The users can sort their own crap out.

March 31 I will be finalizing my decree. I have the president on my side so all is good. Unfortunatly you can't kick the users out into left field and expect them to fend for themselvs so I have to go around and TEACH everyone individually about 3 times each. ugh.

 

[Javamahn]

We recently exceeded the 16GB space limitations of the IS and had a downed email server for 1/2 a day. At this point we have notified the users that limits will be enforced and have begun manually archiving users folders. Some of these exceed 1.5GB ! I think with a failed server you have very little resistance to change.. However I do not recommend it as the 1st argument towards establishing space limitation policies.

BTW Do I still need to run eseutil /d to regain empty spce now?

 

[jlmartini]

Hi - I am also have major problems with some users using up a lot space in the exchange database. Currently 5 users use 50% of the database!!! I have about 100 users on this one server. For most users (not the specials one above) we use the Mailbox Cleanup Agent and let it run every Sunday. It cleans out all mail older than 30 days. That utility moves the mail to the System Cleanup folder and then after 14 days it gets deleted from there. It does help a little but some people want to be excluded from the clean up because they want to understand Personal Folders.

We don't have limits but we will soon. I am working on a plan now becasue the priv.ede has reached 13G.

 

[weidanze]

I found this program and just bought a enterprise license.

http://www.smtechnologies.com/

downloads - Outlook ArchiverER

It's not perfect, but I'm going to have user use it instead of pst.

Exchange 5.5 enterprise - over 2000 Users
Privite store size currently 22 GIG - on a 60 GIG drive
Limits
50000K - Warning
60000K - Prohibit send
70000K - Disable mailbox

 

[smoss51]

Well - it's comforting to know that I'm not the only admin with this issue.

Warning 60000K
Prohibit Send 75000K
Nada on prohibit send & receive

Enterprise edition with 800 mailboxes, about 10% are over the limit.

PSTs are out of control here and several have hit the 2Gb limit (our help desk has come up with some creative ways of recovering them).

We have decided to look for an automated email archive solution - not only for the PST and space issue, but also to aid in the migration to E2K. Currently looking at KVS, Educom and Legato with EMC Centerra as the storage. If anyone has used any of the above, I'd like to hear your opinion.

 

[smlull]

What happened to the "Best Business Practice" of NOT keeping emails for an eternity? I thought the whole idea of email was just like a one time shot. Are there any white papers on best standards? In my case, now that our local IS in in charge of email, EVERYONE needs email! I have over 2600 users with 1400 currently on. Any ideas? Exchange is too expensive to put out to the masses.

Scott

 

[cmegha2001]

Tell the CFO you need to buy 4 37Gig 15K SCSI Drives and a RAID5 Card then tell hime the cost. he should make the users delete there email.... I did this and worked for me LOL

 

[itadmin88]

I am dealing with a similar issue. I am running MSExchange 5.5 Enterprise edition and have several users that view their mailbox as a file server with mailboxes that exceed 2GB.

Besides the obvious disk space issue, and backup duration, does anyone know of any additional reasons why it is important to limit mailbox size? I need more ammunition as they argue that hard drives are cheap and we therefore shouldn't worry about the size of the information store. I need more technical reasons why we should limit maibox size. Are there performance issues that effect the server?

 

[smlull]

to itadmin88.

I made my case for, "if we get sued, and we have to produce old emails they only go back 60 days" (personally, I'd like to make it 30 days) Our corp lawyers agreed as they didn't want trails of emails.

I've also gone from like a 2 gig private store to 4.3 gig and I can see a difference in performance. It takes longer to unload to do the backup and longer to reload the exchange service once the server has been bounced.

Hope that helps,
Exchngnewguy > aka Scott

 

[Greatgazzoo]

Most of you are far too easy going for me. At our company we have over 1000 mail boxes and we enforce size of 50mb with warning at 40mb and stop send at 45mb. We do have about 30 exceptions for VP and Managers but even they are at 75mb with warning at 65mb and stop send at 70mb. We recomend users to keep .pst files on their local drives and if it is really important to keep then back up to CD Rom every month. We also try to educate our users to create a new .pst file each year and backup the old on to CD Rom if required. The exchange server is set to delete all mail in sent items and the inbox after 60 days. Deleted items are cleaned out every Sunday.

Having policies set from the top down are crucial and educating those who make the decisions is not an easy task. That being stated it is essential in creating a manageable network environment!

Just my two cents.