Mail Size 300+MB good or bad?

[homerunkevin]

Tek-Tip Forum

My boss email box is approaching 320MB in size. She complains that it slow when checking her email through Outlook at work. Is that normal?

My approach to this is to make a complete backup of her mailbox, so that she can store all everything in what she needs.

Is archiving a good idea? I find that it troublesome if user look at her email at 2 computers? Is it kind of tricky to set which date to archive from? Sometime, when archiving some message get disappear?

Do you guys have any good article how to maintain some troublesome situation when management don't want their delete any of message?

Is there any downsize to have such a large mailbox? How about connectivity? Was just curious?

Thank You Much.


Love always,
Kevin Z
Techncial Support specailist

 

[Psingh]

Hi,

According to me 320MB size is to much. You should archive the older messages and keep the archived file on a network share, from where your boss can easily access whenever there is a need from any system on the network.

PSingh

 

[securityforums]

Indeed as psingh says simply configure the archive to archive to a user's networked drive hence the multiple access is not a problem

Just so you know ive worked with several mailboxes above this size, ive seen one user with a 1.4gig mailbox actually in the information store and a 1.8gig PST on their personal network drive!!

The exchange side of things is fine, although the pst is unusable. Its all about mailbox management, maybe think about implementing quotas or similar to stop the mailbox getting this full in the future.

In the storage group simply select the store, properties and then the limit tab. Here you can issue a warning when the mailbox hits x meg, or prohibit sending and recieving totally once its hit another defined value(this works really well



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http://exchange.security-forums.com

http://www.security-forums.com

 

[pdtit]

Kevin,

Beside a mailbox size of over 300Mb slows down your system, you can check the following :

- Is she using a direct connection to the Exchange server or is it a PST-file on her machine locally.

- Try to make the number of mail items in her INBOX as small as possible. When outlook opens, it "pulls" all data from the exchange server for the folder which is opened first (Inbox is the default)
If a lot of messages are stored in the Inbox, try putting
them in subfolders.

Remark : these are only minor solutions; a large mailbox will never be a fast-Outlook opener !!
Archiving can be a good solution, such as the storage limits as suggested before.

Regards,

Peter

 

[kmcferrin]

If I recall correctly, under normal circumstances the maximum size that a .PST works is 1.5 GB. Anything larger than that and you're risking serious corruption. In my opinion though, that is still far too large.

I generally advocate a limit of 50-100 MB for normal users, executives usually get 200-250 MB, and everyone needs to archive if they want to keep any more data than that. I've justified this to the user base with a couple lines, one of them is that large mail databases degrade server performance. They also take longer to backup, and if the mail stores are large enough you'll end up spanning multiple tapes (and nobody wants to change tapes at 2AM on a Saturday).

Generally we have told users that we do not support archiving, but they may archive their messages onto their local PCs at their own risk. Again, executives tend to get a break here, as we'll sometimes archive them to a network share or if they are a laptop user they can archive to an offline folder (a Win2K offline folder that syncs with a share on the server using Intellimirror, not an Outlook .OST file) so that it is always available to them AND backed up.

There may also be legal or other regulatory requirements depending on what industry you are in. Most legal departments that I have dealt with want to retain the old messages for as short of a period as possible to reduce potential liability.

 

[wibbe]

Hi homerunkevin,

300 Mb is no size at all for Exchange.
I have several mailboxes over 1 Gb.

But Outlook may get slow if you dont use it correctly.
Sort youre mail in subfolders. See pdtit note above.
Disable offline use or limit the offline use to only the nessesary folders.
Use Outlook 2000-SP1 or later.

Never use PST-files, you will get problems with backup and lost mail soner or later. If you use it anyway it should NOT be used with windows offline files.

Use more storage groups and backup stations if you need.
It will save you both time and money.

PST is a leftover from previus Outlook versions.

// Wibbe