Exchange 2003 Mailbox Size Limits
Hi,
Last fall I installed a new server and Exchange 2003. All is working great, but I am seeing peoples mailboxes begin to balloon. Mailboxes have gone from 250 to over 800 meg in the past 6 months. We are a small company, and we DO have the diskspace and processing power at this point to handle as much as people want to throw at it. My concern is that as time goes on, poor mailbox maintenance practices become commonplace and that large mailboxes could become troublesome.
Does anyone out there have any information about any performance considerations with Exchange 2003 and large mailboxes?
Do you have any reasons that larger mailboxes are problematic or arguments for maintaining smaller mailboxes?
Thanks for your help.
Last fall I installed a new server and Exchange 2003. All is working great, but I am seeing peoples mailboxes begin to balloon. Mailboxes have gone from 250 to over 800 meg in the past 6 months. We are a small company, and we DO have the diskspace and processing power at this point to handle as much as people want to throw at it. My concern is that as time goes on, poor mailbox maintenance practices become commonplace and that large mailboxes could become troublesome.
Does anyone out there have any information about any performance considerations with Exchange 2003 and large mailboxes?
Do you have any reasons that larger mailboxes are problematic or arguments for maintaining smaller mailboxes?
Thanks for your help.
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Hi good day TW.
you should tell us if you have standard or enterprise, Standard being limited to 16GB the performance impact is not that important, it is more a factor of controlling the Pack rat syndrome, some users are totally in distress if they have to delete an email that is 2 years old. As mentioned above Exchange let you, set the maximum size mailbox easily from active directory for Users on the exchange server or on your machine if you installed the management tools from the exchange setup CD.
for the standard still I would divide the database in 3 storage group, a small user storage , a Big users Storage and an "untouchable Storage" reserved for the Top Brass, this way you give another level of protection to your users so they have separate database files if one goes down the others are still running and you can do a much faster restore and backup. we are keeping our users to under 300MB by rules, only the Management is exempted, not very fair, is not it? by the way is this common practice in every office? just wondering... anyway i do not know the answer for enterprise but we love to know what best practice is, for exchange enterprise. good day
by the way we are running 50 users on exchange 2003 with an old dual 733Mhz with 1024mb of Ram, a raid that is 30GB, our database is around 10GB and the system is plenty fast...hope it helped a little
you should tell us if you have standard or enterprise, Standard being limited to 16GB the performance impact is not that important, it is more a factor of controlling the Pack rat syndrome, some users are totally in distress if they have to delete an email that is 2 years old. As mentioned above Exchange let you, set the maximum size mailbox easily from active directory for Users on the exchange server or on your machine if you installed the management tools from the exchange setup CD.
for the standard still I would divide the database in 3 storage group, a small user storage , a Big users Storage and an "untouchable Storage" reserved for the Top Brass, this way you give another level of protection to your users so they have separate database files if one goes down the others are still running and you can do a much faster restore and backup. we are keeping our users to under 300MB by rules, only the Management is exempted, not very fair, is not it? by the way is this common practice in every office? just wondering... anyway i do not know the answer for enterprise but we love to know what best practice is, for exchange enterprise. good day
by the way we are running 50 users on exchange 2003 with an old dual 733Mhz with 1024mb of Ram, a raid that is 30GB, our database is around 10GB and the system is plenty fast...hope it helped a little
ahh... The standard Exchange limit is 16gig. If you go with Enterprise Exchange the limit of 16 gig is gone.
ASKER
Thanks for the additional info. We are using Exchange 2003 Enterprise. With the help of you all, I am in the process of setting a standard mailbox limit of 250mb, with exceptions for Sr. Management. Their feeling is that their time is better used working, than cleaning out their emails, and that if the majority of the users have well managed mailboxes, their larger mailboxes will not signficantly delay a restoral ... and in any case, the restoral delay as a result of their larger mailbox sizes will not be as significant as the time it would take to manage their email. In our case, I have to agree. I am also setting up rules on their mailboxes to better handle spam (which is an ever-growing problem), so that they are not keeping that information. I am also working to educate users on the issue of duplication, and the lack of necessity to store a document received in an email in both the email and externally to the email on the server.
Thanks for all your feedback.
Thanks for all your feedback.
Isi