Exchange Team blog got an upgrade!
We are excited to announce that Exchange Team blog got an upgrade! We wanted to enrich the experience of visiting our blog site, as well as wanted to improve the site design and add several features to the site. Firstly, you will notice that we are now hosted at the different URL, and our new home is at: http://msexchangeteam.com/ The new "main" RSS 2.0 feed link is: http://msexchangeteam.com/rss.aspx Then, you will notice that the whole site got a visual overhaul, hopefully it is more pleasing to view. Hope you like it! Few other things that are brand new: - The Videos section of the blog. Here we will be placing different videos that we will be recording occasionally - things like short interviews with members of Exchange product group, demos of something cool in Exchange and so on. Who knows, some Exchange party video might make it up there too! - The ability to add attachments to blog posts; no more posting of scripts in the body of the post (which can cause formatting and syntax issues later). All of the "old" links RSS links and feeds should keep on working (so the redirection is in place from old http://blogs.technet.com/exchange to new http://msexchangeteam.com/. We plan to keep this redirection in place for a good while, but just to make sure - you might want to update your RSS clients to point to the new URL so you can keep on getting your dose of Exchange-related goodness without any interruptions in the future! As always, feedback is welcome. Look out for more new features and improvements we are planning! - Exchange Team Blog crewRecipient Rate Limit Increase to 10K for Office 365 and Exchange Online
Update 2/26/2013: In response to your feedback, we have also raised the limit for Office 365 for Education plans (A2, A3, A4) to 10,000 recipients per day. In response to feedback from our customers, we have increased the recipient rate limit within Office 365 Enterprise (E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, and K2), Professionals and Small Businesses (P1), and Government plans (G1, G2, G3, and G4) to allow users to send email to up to 10,000 recipients per day. These new limits also apply to standalone Exchange Online plans (Kiosk, Plan 1, and Plan 2). Previously, the recipient rate limit for users of these plans had been set at a maximum of 1,500 recipients per day. Recipient rate limits exist to discourage users from sending large volumes of unsolicited commercial email, commonly referred to as spam. These limits protect our online service from becoming a source of spam and, as a result of these protections, keep our customers’ email messages flowing. Datacenter enhancements have allowed us to increase this limit while maintaining the same level of protection. These limits apply both to email messages sent within an organization and those delivered to external organizations. The best way to avoid exceeding the recipient rate limit is to use distribution groups when sending messages to large numbers of recipients. Distribution groups stored in the shared address book are counted as a single recipient toward the recipient rate limit. For more information, see Strategies to Support Bulk Email. Office 365 customers who need to send legitimate bulk commercial email — such as customer newsletters – should continue to use third-party providers that specialize in these services. If you would like more information on recipient rate limits, see Bulk Email and Daily Recipient Rate Limits. We made this change because of your feedback. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, and please keep it up! Steve ChewHow does your Exchange garden grow?
One question we often get asked when talking to customers contemplating an Exchange upgrade or a switch from a competitor’s mail system is, "how many users per server can Exchange handle?" Nowadays, that’s an open question - it very much depends on what kind of users you have, what kind of storage you’re using and how powerful your servers are. When Exchange 4.0 was released in 1996, a decent server might have had 256Mb of RAM and a 90MHz Pentium processor, with maybe a handful of GBs of SCSI disk in the box and possibly a DAT tape drive. Users’ mailboxes might have been in the 10-20Mb size range, and the average user sent or received only a small amount of email per day. At that time, server sizing was pretty much a function of how much computing horsepower you could afford - the CPU power, disk size & speed and memory capacity available (along with the all-important user profile) would determine the number of users per server, and arbitrary decisions would be made about maximum message sizes, mailbox size etc. Now, it’s possible to buy even mid-range servers that will cope with many thousands of users, and the bottleneck has moved down to the storage level in many instances as user mailboxes have grown in size and we send and receive far more mail, and many larger messages too. We’d be interested in hearing anecdotes about particularly unusual messaging environments you might have - how large do your servers grow? What’s the biggest mailbox you’ve ever seen (assuming you’re not restricting with quotas)? How much data does your total Exchange system manage? What’s the biggest single database - etc, etc... you get the picture. Some factoids to get you started... if you have anything along these lines, please post a comment: - One customer (who is part of the Exchange Technology Adoption Program) sets no limit on message sizes internally - and one time saw a single message with attachments totaling 2.4Gb in size! (which Exchange delivered! - the recipient’s mailbox quota was instantly blown apart though...) - The largest single Exchange 5.5 Public Folder Information Store I’ve come across was 800Gb in size - There’s a limit of 1,000 Exchange 2000/2003 servers in an org - has anyone come close, or hit that limit? - One customer deploys around 250,000 Exchange users per server and has over 9,000,000 users in total (you guessed it, they’re an ISP) - The most heavy user of public folders in the world (that we know about) has about 1,500,000 public folders containing around 8Tb of data So come on: let’s hear your war stories - post a comment with your amazing data :) - Ewan Dalton
