Inbox management issue

Guest... you should setup a mailbox management policy to empty the deleted items folder :)

^these are my new best friends.

A lot of people use their deleted folder though. Everyone where I work uses outlook differently. Some keep all emails and do mass delete, some people archive everything apart from the months emails. Some delete everything older than 3 or 4 months...

Its best to let them decide but just have a few blanket rules. Of course some people have slightly different rules, but then they do own the company!
 
Yea you are right, it's annoying how people use it as a bloody filing folder, I mean you don't file paperwork In a bin do you? Lol. Bloody users!
 
We dont allow any attachments over 10mb external and 20mb internal.

Inbox sizes are as follows...

Over 500Mb – Warning about exceeding the size limit
Over 600Mb – Can no longer send emails
Over 700Mb – Can no longer send or receive emails

However we do backup some large PSTs (around 2gb i think is the biggest someone has) We assist anyone who needs help with getting their inbox to the correct size. Some people just forget to delete their 'deleted items' sometimes

We do use another document management (Watermark Volume)

Maybe having a (backed up) document management system for cad files etc instead of using Outlook to store it all is a better way to go


We impliment a similar system although we set the limits slightly higher. I think we will look towards removing it totally once we move everyone across to the Archive solution. Oh and the biggest PST we moved was over 6gb.
 
In the absense of larger mailbox limits and PSTs on network shares we adopted the following strategy. Symantec DLO and backing up a specific folder on the C:\.
 
First of all id say if you have mailboxes that big it cant all be work data, make sure you have file name filters for mp3, wma, ogg, wmv, avi, mpe, mpg etc etc

Secondly fire up exmerge and do a 'copy' extract of any mails with those attachement filenames, you dont have to view the content (i.e. possible invasion of privacy) but you can look at the pst file sizes to determine if those mailboxes contained such files. If you definately have a problem and a big space saving you can speak to your management about introducing a ban on those files and then rerun exmerge as a move into psts, backup the psts (just in case) then delete them

Symantec Evault is a good option even if i dont like the software too much, it introduces the idea of tiered storage i.e. if your exchange servers disks are high cost/high activity then you dont really want to be keeping data in them that is used infrequently and its vaulting policies cater to that, you can also switch vault stores periodically so that existing stores become frozen and you can then back them up less frequently because they wont have new data flowing into them.
If i remember rightly its also licensed on a per user basis, you can install with a limited number of licenses and only enable it for your worst offenders

There are other solutions like ways of automacally dumping attachments to folders but its messy and you loose single instance which doesnt happen if you stick with exchange/evault

Ofc course this is all bad advice since the best solution is exchange 2010 :)
 
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