Data storage is not cheap. Yes, you heard me right.
You can buy a 400 GB SATA HDD for £100 or so, but it’s not one that will stand up to hard use. It’s not even suitable for it. For that you want a SCSI (or SASI or…) HDD which is considerably more expensive (100% or more). Further, we IT guys realise that your data is important. Therefore we not only build in redundancy (RAID 1 or RAID 5 or better), adding expense (at least a 25% overhead over the over), but we need to back it up. That’s where it gets really expensive. A LTO-3 drive costs thousands and only backs up 400 GB without compression (and much data is already compressed). If you want to back up more, then you need multiple tape units or a tape changer or a silo or a combination thereof. And don’t forget that there’s typically only a very small time window in which to back up all the data. $$$$$. And then there are the tapes. Which are not cheap. After that, there’s the off-site backup facility. But it’s all cheaper than losing your data and you can sleep easy at night.
To give an example, one of my users’ servers accidentally crashed, leaving the data drive apparently largely trashed. They had backups of the original data but not the processed data, and had a deadline looming. The quote from the recovery place was vastly more than they were prepared to pay, with no guarantee of success. They baulked at the cost and the whole team worked 24 hours a day for many days to recreate the data.
What if you make an inbox rule that auto-forwards all your work email to your regular ISP account? Then at least you’d have your freaking email.
… let me guess: they don’t let you make your own inbox rules either?
I am SO not ever working wherever you folks work.
Why, for the luvvagod, would the IT Department not want folks to download and store their email locally? It frees up space on the IMAP mailserver and there’s an obvious legitimate business interest in retaining copies of workplace correspondence.
Do they also have rules against you keeping company missives in your file cabinets? Do they send people around with shredders to destroy your old paperwork when it gets a few weeks old?
We are not allowed to archive items to our local hard drive. It’s company policy, and items in our In-Box are automatically deleted after 30 days, unless you move them to a folder.
Also, the Mailbox is Full warning will prevent you from sending e-mails, but you can still receive.
I get 100 MB for my personal (company) use and 200 MB for a shared one that sales uses to send me stuff. I can barely keep 2 months worth of info in the shared one without going over the limit, but since anything I reply to from the shared one goes out via my personal one with a “On Behalf of” on it, as long as I keep my personal company one below the limit I don’t care how big the shared one gets.
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What happens if you want to check an email from last year to confirm something, or to show a client that they did, in fact, order 65,000 widgets on that day?
I agree with AHunter3, the idea of not being able to archive your work email to the hard drive of your work computer is just bizarre.
Quartz, i’m sure you’re right about the cost of storage and the problems of data integrity, backups, etc. My expertise in administering this sort of stuff is zero. Still, it seems to me that some companies are pretty stingy with their email storage, given how important email is to many businesses.
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
What if you make an inbox rule that auto-forwards all your work email to your regular ISP account? Then at least you’d have your freaking email.
… let me guess: they don’t let you make your own inbox rules either?
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It’s possible you might run afoul of some confidentiality requirements by doing this, depending on exactly what your job is and what’s in the emails. IT people can’t know anything about the security of someone’s personal email account- popular email services like Hotmail have been hacked in the past, so you wouldn’t want to trust them with confidential data.
One reason might be that their local computers are laptops, and they’re concerned about sensitive information (social security numbers, credit card numbers, medical records, trade secrets, or what have you) getting out if the laptop were lost or stolen.
Some companies do have rules about where you can store certain kinds of sensitive information. They might require you to keep it somewhere more secure than your office file cabinet.
Is the mailbox size restriction just to do with storage costs? No tech expert here but doesn’t your entire mailbox download over the network every morning when you log on? Is the restriction not possibly something to do with network traffic at start of business rather than just storage cost?
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
What if you make an inbox rule that auto-forwards all your work email to your regular ISP account? Then at least you’d have your freaking email.
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This is typically a way of getting fired very quickly. Can you say, “Security breach”?
I am the IT dept at one of my sites. The reason to have a policy of not retaining email is legal. Basically, if you haven’t got it, the lawyers can’t trawl through it, and as long as you’re consistent then you can’t get dinged for deleting an email that might have been interesting.
In the U.K. paper records are not necessarily subject to the Data Protection Act.
[QUOTE=rocksolid]
Is the mailbox size restriction just to do with storage costs? No tech expert here but doesn’t your entire mailbox download over the network every morning when you log on? Is the restriction not possibly something to do with network traffic at start of business rather than just storage cost?
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Over low bandwidth links, you typically have a local replica of your mailbase. In Outlook it’s a .OST file.
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
Why, for the luvvagod, would the IT Department not want folks to download and store their email locally? It frees up space on the IMAP mailserver and there’s an obvious legitimate business interest in retaining copies of workplace correspondence.
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It’s not weird, it’s extremely common. Local hard drives are seldom backed up, and as mentioned email is often required to be purged for legal reasons.
[QUOTE=mhendo] Quartz, i’m sure you’re right about the cost of storage and the problems of data integrity, backups, etc. My expertise in administering this sort of stuff is zero. Still, it seems to me that some companies are pretty stingy with their email storage, given how important email is to many businesses.
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In my experience the space issue is not so much the emails themselves, but the files added to the emails as attachments. Emails are small (a few kilobytes), but can have huge attachments. Instead of putting the attachment on a shared drive and sending everyone a link, people distribute the attachment directly. And the recipients keep the attachment in the mailbase.
[QUOTE=Tully Mars]
If my mailbox is full, why is there room for the email that tells me my mailbox is full? Especially when it happens on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
The friggin’ message should say “Your mailbox is almost, but not quite, full.”
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Actually, most file systems are set up with both hard and soft quotas. You absolutely can’t go over the hard quota; the system just won’t let you. Going over the soft quota is allowed, for a while, but it nags you, and if you don’t fix it in a certain amount of time, it cuts you off.
No, it does not. It’ll only download the new stuff.
Why are you putting premium drives into a RAID? Wouldn’t that make it more of a RAD?
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
What if you make an inbox rule that auto-forwards all your work email to your regular ISP account? Then at least you’d have your freaking email.
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I thought of another reason why you might not want to do that.
It’s not that uncommon for viruses and worms to propagate around a company’s email system- all it takes is one person taking their work laptop online at home, getting it infected, then bringing it to work and plugging it into the intranet. Company intranets are usually set up to be fairly trusting of other machines on the intranet, since doing anything else usually gets in the way of some work somebody wants to get done.
The IT department will have to handle any infections at work. But if you transmitted a virus to your home computer this way, you’d have to deal with it yourself, which is generally a pain.
[QUOTE=Quartz]
In my experience the space issue is not so much the emails themselves, but the files added to the emails as attachments. Emails are small (a few kilobytes), but can have huge attachments. Instead of putting the attachment on a shared drive and sending everyone a link, people distribute the attachment directly. And the recipients keep the attachment in the mailbase.
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That is an issue. But the real issue is that the IT department should setup enough space for the way people use email not the way that is easiest for the IT department.
[QUOTE=Quartz]
Instead of putting the attachment on a shared drive and sending everyone a link, people distribute the attachment directly. And the recipients keep the attachment in the mailbase.
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I’ve been meaning to ask this: If I send an email with a 1MB attachement to two people and we are all on the same server/site will Exchange save unique copies of the attachement or is it smart enough to consolidate them?
[QUOTE=Steve MB]
I got another of these greetings in my LookOut inbox at work this morning. This happens a few times a month.
Gee, I wonder if my cow orkers’ habit of sending every hundred-word missive in the form of a 50KB Word attachment – or a 500KB PowerPoint slideshow with about six words of actual information per slide – has something to do with the problem. Or maybe it’s the absolute necessity of attaching at least one bit of inane clip art to every “social event” announcement. (Re the latter: Does LookOut have any sort of “conflicts with a subsequent engagement” filter?)
Grrrrr…
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I concur. What about those super big signature attachments from the people who actually set up the mailbox limits?
[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
What really drove me crazy at my last job is that everyone would e-mail huge files to each other…despite the fact that we were on a network, and could access the files ourselves, which were neatly sorted in folders labeled with the project number. Why not just an e-mail saying “such and such a file is ready for you to look at, and is saved in the project folder?” Why why why?
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My office shares files via file path (copy and pasted right out of and right back into windows explorer). Very convenient. Some people are really hung up on them, though. When I get a work request, sometimes I’ll turn it around quick and reply with “File’s done, on the server” to which I get the snotty reply of “File path please?” Dude, it is RIGHT there in the quoted bottom of my email, where you sent it to me not 1/2 an hour ago.
There are a couple of people who still insist on sending files via email instead of server path. This has lead to confusion and version control issues is nearly every case. (And people bitching because the whole mail server chokes because some idiot emailed a 10+MB file to a dozen people.)
My mailbox cap, as you might guess, is VERY high. However, this is not the case for everyone in the company, and I have coworkers who like to CC everyone and their boss, all the time.
Word on the Illustrated Social Announcements. Everytime I get an colorful stationary/graphic laden email anouncing so-and-so’s baby shower, I think: Why, WHY did I leave Photoshop on that machine (inherited by the Office Manager) when I upgraded?
[QUOTE=CaveMike]
I’ve been meaning to ask this: If I send an email with a 1MB attachement to two people and we are all on the same server/site will Exchange save unique copies of the attachement or is it smart enough to consolidate them?
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I don’t know. Each copy still counts against the recipient’s quota though. And against yours.
Why does your e-mail service suck so much? Even hotmail gives me 1000MB of storage space for free. I haven’t deleted any e-mails in years (except the junk ones, which admittedly I have to wade through a bit every day) and I’m only using 8% of my limit.
[QUOTE=gazpacho]
But the real issue is that the IT department should setup enough space for the way people use email not the way that is easiest for the IT department.
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Then IT departments should be funded to be able to handle that type of use; most often they are not. IT normally does what it can with what it has, but storage (as Quartz pointed out) is expensive. Not only does IT have to fund the ancillary necessities (e.g., backup hardware, backup software, redundant systems, etc…), but it also has to roadmap for the near future as warranties eventually run out, equipment quickly becomes obsolete, storage requirements soar–whether through end-user mismanagment or actual necessity–and other projects come along that take a piece of the increasingly small budget pie.
In that situation, Exchange will save three copies: one for each recipient and one in the sender’s Sent folder.
If someone would fund most IT departments the same way Microsoft funds theirs, I betcha you’ll see an increase in mail storage space. Until that happens, though, IT is limited to what they’re given.
