Ooooooo... a can of worms!

Our default for most users is PSAR at 160MB
Our "special" people get PSARs somewhere between 200MB and 500MB - the higher 
levels mostly to Marketing and Real Estate folks who can't get their vendors to 
use sftp for ridiculously large graphic and CAD files.  That being said, we 
have a 20MB limit on incoming mail.  We have one exec who is capped at 1.5GB 
and another at 2GB (20,000 and 28,000 items respectively).  The justification 
for increasing the mailbox limit is usually "if my mailbox fills up I'll miss 
important email".  So you increase it again, it fills up, increase, it fills, 
rinse, repeat, rinse...

We currently have a group of users using Exchange Personal Archives with 
Retention Policies and Tags.  These currently have no limits on them which is 
doing a great job of proving that the more space you give a user the more 
"stuff" they will put in there.  Case in point with the mailbox limits.  It 
also proves that users will put the longest retention tag on everything they 
keep.  The other users are still using PSTs for now, which would be migrated 
into Personal Archives if we continue to move that direction.  And we're 
talking terabytes in that alone.

The main issue here isn't the storage.  I could easily throw terabytes at the 
servers to accommodate.  The issue is backup and recovery.  I know, I know, 
we've been told that if we're running a DAG that tape backups are necessarily 
needed but tape backup is part of our DR strategy.  The problem is if you're 
going to back up your mailbox databases it has to go somewhere, whether on tape 
or disk-to-disk.  We could backup to the cloud but there is an expense to that 
as well.

And it's hard to impose quotas on mailboxes without the users pointing to 
Google mail and saying "They give me 15GB!!!  Why can't we have 15GB???"  The 
fact is that Google has the resources to backup and restore that kind of data.

Good luck!

Paul


From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Carol Fee
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2017 12:08 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Exchange] Exchange User Mailbox Size Limits

I'm curious to know what/if any user mailbox size limits people are setting 
these days.  So .... My questions are

Are you using Exchange on premise/Azure/Office 365 ? (We are Exchange on prem)

Do you use an archiving solution for your Exchange mailboxes ?  (We are using 
Barracuda Message Archiver)

If so, what is archived ? (We automatically archive nightly anything >50kb)

What have you set for size limits on your Exchange mailboxes ?

Thanks in advance.


________________________________
Carol Fee
Network Administrator
617-338-0623
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

[cid:[email protected]]
   Massachusetts Bar Association
   20 West Street
   Boston, MA 02111-1204
   (617) 338-0500


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