I published a post, Claiming E-Mail Bankruptcy, a little over a week ago describing instances where some organizations were claiming "e-mail free" days to encourage more personal forms of collaboration/communication such as speaking to colleagues or even getting in some face time. Another portion of the post discussed ways of dealing with a bursting Inbox and this last subject has been a contentious issue with me.
Every organization seems to have their own way to divy up capacity for user e-mail that range from the very restrictive:
- My wife's previous employer automatically deleted anything older than 30 days, so they were forced to print out and file messages older than that in order to retain it. So much for the paperless office.
To the very generous:
- One previous employer encouraged users to keep everything even though the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) didn't exist and there was no retention policy. Storage is free, isn't it?
While I can appreciate the generous approach and don't wish to hamstring the business, IT exists to support them after all, I think we could be doing the end-users a disservice by not encouraging them to manage their e-mail and consciously determine what to retain and what to delete. Also, the following problems could arise when unchecked growth of the user's mailbox is allowed:
- Users complain that their mail client (Outlook at my current employer) takes too long to load. Well, if your mailbox wasn't pushing 2 Gigabytes (GB) this wouldn't be problem.
- Backup window for the e-mail server(s) increases and usually a restore takes 1.5 times longer than the backup.
- Older versions of Microsoft Exchange had restrictive size limits on the Information Store that supports all of the mailboxes.
- Some recovery methods don't deal well with large mailboxes. We use Microsoft's Exmerge utility to extract mailboxes to a personal folder format (.pst) for individual message recovery. The size limit for a .pst is reportedly 2GB, but I've been unable to open .pst files smaller than that.
I found that the user with the 2GB mailbox has 1GB of messages (about 10,000 dating back to 1998) in the Deleted Items folder and when asked, insisted that while most of the contents could be permanently deleted; there were messages that needed to be kept. Why store them in Deleted Items then?!?
The reason this isn't a straightforward case of educating the user or defining capacity limits is that many of the bloated mailboxes belong to senior executives and no one is going to set boundaries for them. All of our other users have a default capacity defined and with a few exceptions everyone is pretty happy. I would like to configure Outlook for everyone to automatically delete anything in Deleted Items when exiting, but who knows what packrat out is there is using this folder for message retention.
What are your thoughts? Have you set limits via corporate policy, thresholds, group policy function or some other method? How much have the users screamed and did you find that another strategy (carte blanche?) was necessary for your executives.
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