Introduction
I regularly meet with customers and discuss their Exchange Server architecture. Two topics frequently come up so I thought I'd discuss them with everybody and give my perspe...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
We have numerous mailboxes in our organization larger than 2GB...some of the largest are close to 10GB. ::cringe:: Can anyone beat that? :)
For many years our users were feared into not deleting ANY email other than spam because they thought they might be violating some State law regarding public records (we're a local govt. agency). Any attemps at convincing management to set mailbox limits in the past was met with strong resistance. There was also no attachment size limits for a few years before I arrived. I did convince them to enable message size limits because of DoS vulnerabilities at least (that and people would try and send a 600MB attachment and choke the server).
Now you can imagine that our Exchange Server performance is rather pitiful with such large mailboxes. I've worked to gather data to PROVE to management that the poor performance is due to large mailboxes & number of items per folder. Now that their Outlook performance sucks...guess what? They're beginning to listen!
We've also implemented a 3rd party email archiving solution...which has drastically helped the mailboxes sizes, but now the # of items per folder is the problem because the stubs are still there. I've seen mailboxes with 45,000 and up to 250,000 items in ONE FOLDER. Our next steps are to start deleting the stubs older than 1 year to reduce # of items per folder and enforcing a 200MB mailbox size limit via our archiving solution.
Thanks for posting this great blog. It helps shed some light on what email gluttons we are in our org. They always ask questions like, imagine how many emails Microsoft must get, they don't have these performance problems? It helps when you have a 200MB mailbox compared to a 10GB one!!
-Brian S
For many years our users were feared into not deleting ANY email other than spam because they thought they might be violating some State law regarding public records (we're a local govt. agency). Any attemps at convincing management to set mailbox limits in the past was met with strong resistance. There was also no attachment size limits for a few years before I arrived. I did convince them to enable message size limits because of DoS vulnerabilities at least (that and people would try and send a 600MB attachment and choke the server).
Now you can imagine that our Exchange Server performance is rather pitiful with such large mailboxes. I've worked to gather data to PROVE to management that the poor performance is due to large mailboxes & number of items per folder. Now that their Outlook performance sucks...guess what? They're beginning to listen!
We've also implemented a 3rd party email archiving solution...which has drastically helped the mailboxes sizes, but now the # of items per folder is the problem because the stubs are still there. I've seen mailboxes with 45,000 and up to 250,000 items in ONE FOLDER. Our next steps are to start deleting the stubs older than 1 year to reduce # of items per folder and enforcing a 200MB mailbox size limit via our archiving solution.
Thanks for posting this great blog. It helps shed some light on what email gluttons we are in our org. They always ask questions like, imagine how many emails Microsoft must get, they don't have these performance problems? It helps when you have a 200MB mailbox compared to a 10GB one!!
-Brian S