Fortune 10 company employee here. We just upgraded everyone to 200 Mb! That’s a 100% improvement. It wasn’t all that many years ago that we were happy to have our quotas upgraded from 20 Mb!
We still have a stupid 10 Mb attachment limit, though.
Another huge company here, we get nagged at 700Mb, and capped at 1Gb.
What’s stupid about it is that I have a shit-ton of files and notes saved, and have to archive them to my laptop hard drive. They don’t have an enterprise level backup policy that doesn’t suck, so everything over that 1Gb is insecurely stored on a local archive.
The only logical answer is to make me crazy. I think their answer was something about not wanting people to create PST’s on the laptops that they would then need to support.
I have to wonder how many files over 1GB really need to be emailed. 1GB is equivalent to an hour and a half of mp4 video.
I think Cheesesteak is saying that the one-gigabyte limit is on the mailbox as a whole, not that he’s emailing one-gigabyte attachments. At least I hope not.
It’s not one file over 1Gb, it’s all the files from 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 going back to support our document retention requirements.
Ours is 175mb, I think. Maybe 200 mb, but by the time you hit 125 you’re getting regular warnings. I never let mine get over 100 mb (archive) so I’m not sure.
I am envious of your network admin. We have a two-year legal requirement to keep correspondence, but that obligation can be met by keeping archives.
I would be happy enough if I could just get it to the point where I archived once a year, without the Exchange database going over its logical limit. On Friday, I “emergency archived” the biggest mailbox, from January through August. ** 7.5GB.** This user scans and -mails everything, and then complains bitterly when her year is split up. If this behaviour was typical, we would be able to support e-mail for only five users. (We have fifty employees.)
One actual answer (based on my experience in computer forensics) is that when you archive emails to your local computer in PST files, you are taking them out of your companies data retention/distruction process and they become discoverable in the event of a lawsuit or investigation. Most companies (subject to relevent regulations) don’t have to save every email ever sent. Destroying email haphazzardly, however, can look suspicious if relevent materials from a time period of particular interest “happen” to have been destroyed. Therefore a lot of companies will destroy old emails and other records once a specific time period has passed as per a stated records retention policy (unless they are subject to some sort of legal hold due to an ongoing investigation and must be preserved). When you archive your email locally, the company can no longer dispose of them in a structured manner.
Many of our clients had no particular upper limit or record destruction policy so we would routinely deal with individual mailboxes several gigabytes in size.
I was wondering if that had something to do with it. If it were strictly a support issue, even the most work-averse IT department could say “you can archive your own mail, but if the .pst file breaks it’s your problem.”
Yeah, I like to keep each users’ archive fir a complete calendar year - it is tidy that way. Annoying if you.need to find something there and it has been deleted or archived locally and is therefore not in the annual archive. (Because we have mandated retention periods we also keep monthly archives of everything in and out, but they have no sorting at all so it can be depressing to have to rely on them.)