Mailbox Size Impact on Outlook Performance

[dpvone]

I manage the Exchange serever for a small company (currently 187 Users). I have been specifically instructed to impose no limits on the executives' mailboxes. As you may imagine I now have 5 mailboxes which are >2GB, the largest being 6.3GB.

The two biggest offenders are constantly complaining that their email is very slow and occasionally locks up. Does anyone have any data on the impact of having such a big individual mailbox or any white papers which would outline this? I think it has a huge impact on performance on the client but will need to quantify this.

I'll be doing some searches myself and will post links if anyone is interested.

Thanks,
DPVONE

 

[Shaon94]

The exchange server itself is what is limiting you. Your limit if you have the standard version of exchange is 16gb. If you upgrade to Enterprise you are pratically unlimited with 16 TB of space.

(information obtainded from)

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/overview/default.mspx

I ran into the same problem I told my partners that they could either start deleting emails or we would have to upgrade the server and mail software to the enterprise version. They opted for the server and enterprise over deleting any of their email. (this is not a cheap option though)

Shaon94

 

[Shaon94]

Oh another thing you can do in the meantime is set their Deleted items to empty when they close Outlook. I got rid of about 4gb this way...but then I had a lot of mad people who used their Deleted items bin as a mail folder.