# How much email space does the typical medium to large sized business give their employees **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 27, 2011, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245 "2011-11-27T15:56:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Blunt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Blunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blunt)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/1 "2011-11-27T15:56:38Z")
I considered posting this to General Questions, but I think its more of a poll, and there is not a factual answer for it since I’m sure different companies have different policies. I’m probably looking for actual data points (i.e. _my company assigns x GB per user_) and also more general rules (_i.e. most companies give their users between x and y GB_). I’m interested to know how much space a typical company (I’m thinking a few hundred users) would assign each user for their email storage. I’m sure most companies are somewhat flexible and can increase certain users if/when necessary, so I guess I’d be looking for ranges as well as normal limits. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/2 "2011-11-27T22:04:55Z")
We’ve got roughly 280,000 employees and our default mailbox space for a user is 50 MB. Off the top of my head, I think we’ll kick that up to 100 MB for anyone who asks for more space. ---
**Author:** ![Besoeker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@Besoeker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Besoeker)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/3 "2011-11-27T22:07:19Z")
> [@Blunt](#): > > I’m interested to know how much space a typical company (I’m thinking a few hundred users) would assign each user for their email storage. I’m sure most companies are somewhat flexible and can increase certain users if/when necessary, so I guess I’d be looking for ranges as well as normal limits. We get 100 Mb. It’s a serious constraint. ---
**Author:** ![Bag\_of\_Mostly\_Water](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bag_of_mostly_water/32/1029_2.png) [@Bag\_of\_Mostly\_Water](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bag_of_Mostly_Water)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/4 "2011-11-27T22:31:19Z")
I’ve been with two companies recently. One gave 250 MB and the other 500 MB by default. I found 250 MB limiting and many people requested more. ---
**Author:** ![Moonlitherial](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4bbf92/32.png) [@Moonlitherial](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moonlitherial)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/5 "2011-11-27T22:57:22Z")
In the last year my company has gone from 50mb with 100mb for managers to 2gb. It’s been wonderful. The most annoying issue is that they’ve disabled personal storage files so I can’t even self archive. During the period where the limit was low I had to delete mail every day. Considering I have years of email from former jobs it was almost painful. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/6 "2011-11-27T23:55:31Z")
I think the default where I work (about 50,000 employees, not all with email) is 100MB, although more storage is available for managers and others who can justify it. They also use an archiving system called [Enterprise Vault](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Vault), which automatically archives all but the first 300 characters of messages older than a couple of months. As soon as you open any message that’s been archived using this system the rest of the message is automatically retrieved. So that cuts down on the need for large message stores. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/7 "2011-11-28T00:58:04Z")
Back in 2004, I was working for a company that only gave 100MB of email space and I remember bitching back then about what an absurd limitation that was given the price of hard drive space. Nowadays, you could buy 100MB of storage space for about a nickel and it’s even more absurd that it’s still at that level. ---
**Author:** ![Blunt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Blunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blunt)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/8 "2011-11-28T01:35:48Z")
Wow, I guess I was way off and the 2+ GB I’ve got isn’t such a bad deal after all. Thanks for the info, and it looks like I just need to stop whining and keep my account a bit cleaner and delete more attachments! It does seem weird to me though that something like Gmail can give its users 7 GB for free, but I’m sure that’s not really apples to apples and I assume there’s differences between something like that and a individual company’s email servers. ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/9 "2011-11-28T01:36:19Z")
In the government is used to be 10GB but recently came down to 2GB to discourage people from using the exchange server as their own personal file server. Still too much IMO. ---
**Author:** ![Agent\_Foxtrot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc29f/32.png) [@Agent\_Foxtrot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Agent_Foxtrot)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/10 "2011-11-28T02:36:48Z")
100MB for us and not nearly enough. Isn’t space supposed to be cheap nowadays? ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/11 "2011-11-28T02:45:56Z")
> [@Moonlitherial](#): > > The most annoying issue is that they’ve disabled personal storage files so I can’t even self archive. During the period where the limit was low I had to delete mail every day. Considering I have years of email from former jobs it was almost painful. Why in hell would they limit server storage AND prevent you from offline archiving? ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/12 "2011-11-28T02:51:39Z")
Ours is unlimited as far as I know. I work in a heavily regulated industry where e-mails are part of a multi-year retention schedule and we don’t really delete things unless they are completely frivolous. They are all kept on the servers even if we delete them from our personal accounts. 100mb is just piss poor in this day and age. That is just a few cents worth of space which is one hell of a message to tell your employees how much their correspondent is worth. Companies that do something dumb like that should just switch over to a paid cloud e-mail platform or just tell everyone to get a business gmail account. Google does many times better than 100mb for free to anyone that asks. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/13 "2011-11-28T03:21:58Z")
I work for a ~10000 employee company, and get nag-mail when my mailbox approaches 2gb. Which I actually consider outrageous – disk space is ridiculously cheap! That’s 20TB storage if every employee used that limit, which is [maybe $1000 storage cost](https://www.google.com/#q=2tb+drive&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=YP3STrzWJuOniQL5j4SODA&sqi=2&ved=0CJ4BEK0E&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=d98391f7096812b4&biw=1252&bih=1058) for the entire company. I think the limit should be maybe 10-100x that size. I _want_ to have all my e-mails online and searchable, wherever I am and am doing company business. It’s damned useful to be able to do so. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/14 "2011-11-28T03:27:18Z")
You can’t look at the price of a consumer-level hard drive and assume that it costs the same amount for the IT department to maintain a gigabyte or a terabyte of server storage. For one thing, server drives are more expensive than consumer-level ones. Also, a RAID array increases costs. And then there’s the costs for backing up the server. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/15 "2011-11-28T03:37:03Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > You can’t look at the price of a consumer-level hard drive and assume that it costs the same amount for the IT department to maintain a gigabyte or a terabyte of server storage. For one thing, server drives are more expensive than consumer-level ones. Also, a RAID array increases costs. And then there’s the costs for backing up the server. Fine. Let’s say IT drives (plus backup) cost 10x more than consumer drives. At that price it’s $1 per employee for a 2gb e-mail limit for my 10k employee company. Which sounds really reasonably priced. So why not spend $10/employee and give me and my cow-orkers 20gb of e-mail storage? ETA: and why the f doesn’t IT storage scale as well as consumer? My company must use many, many terabytes of storage (we’re a software developer), this stuff could be leased very cheaply from cloud companies like Amazon, backed up and encrypted at extremely attractive prices. ---
**Author:** ![Lord\_Mondegreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/91b2a8/32.png) [@Lord\_Mondegreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Mondegreen)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/16 "2011-11-28T03:47:06Z")
We have over 250,000 employees worldwide. 200 MB each is our email allowance. I got yet another automated email this morning warning me that I was getting close. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/17 "2011-11-28T03:52:55Z")
> [@squeegee](#): > > My company must use many, many terabytes of storage (we’re a software developer), this stuff could be leased very cheaply from cloud companies like Amazon, backed up and encrypted at extremely attractive prices. Cloud storage isn’t that cheap. [Here](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/) is Amazon’s price list for its cloud storage offering. A single terabyte of storage costs $0.14 per gigabyte or about $140 per month (although the cost drops the more you’re storing). And IANAL but I think the company does want to limit the amount of old email that’s kept, because it’s all subject to discovery. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/18 "2011-11-28T04:29:49Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > And IANAL but I think the company does want to limit the amount of old email that’s kept, because it’s all subject to discovery. You have a point. But I’ve been told by The Company that ALL the e-mail we generate is backed up forever, so Be Careful What You Say on e-mail. For what that’s worth. I’d be really surprised if they weren’t keeping all the e-mail they could, but I have no evidence that they do. ---
**Author:** ![Girl\_From\_Mars](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/3da27b/32.png) [@Girl\_From\_Mars](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Girl_From_Mars)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/19 "2011-11-28T08:23:52Z")
I work for a large financial institution in Australia and I get 80MB. It’s a crap allowance considering I work in Marketing - most of our artwork can get to be several MB big and I’m constantly deleting stuff. Then again we have a max 10MB email size (over that, it gets blocked in or out and there’s no way to override that) so that helps! ---
**Author:** ![Farmer\_Jane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Farmer\_Jane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Farmer_Jane)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245/20 "2011-11-28T08:59:12Z")
I get 48 mb and it drives me friggin nuts. Am I supposed to print everything out and start filling it? Oh well - gives me an excuse to delete all of the superintendent’s newsletters. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-email-space-does-the-typical-medium-to-large-sized-business-give-their-employees/604245.md?page=2)