We are in the process of rolling out Email Storage Quotas to our employees and was wondering what most people thought of this. I know that most people think that storage capacity is endless.

What are most companies doing now and are pst's being stored on the servers? Are most of you archiving mail individually for the users or is there a GPO in place? What compliance roadblocks are you running into? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!

Quotas are inherently bad for a # of reasons,they do not encourage good end user mailbox mgmt which is what you want,instead the storage just moves off the mail server onto other disks, either local or server,around the company–each which creates a varied # of technical and business concerns. If MSFT could go back in time, I guarantee you they would re-think their licensing strategy & placing storage limits on the early Exchange msg store, & the whole concept of a PST store. PST’s have become the literal bane of our era. I guess they never could have anticipated Enron, SOX,amended rules to discovery (FRCP) and namely the explosion of email usage,but of all corporations they should’ve.

If you take a look at a quota policy,let’s say 60mb,for a mail population of 5000 users. So you will max out your msg store at 5000*60mb or approx 295gb. Using an avg per person daily email strge consumption, which avgs between 9-12mb per day so let’s use 10mb per day per user or 5000*10mb=approx 50gb per day. So in a very short time,users mail quotas across the board are maxed and everything starts to 1)lose productivity in addressing their mailbox mgmt, and 2)end users start moving msgs off of the “corporate” msg store, and onto random disks (local, server, flash, etc).But if you do some more math it becomes more obvious, let’s just use an avg msg size of 50,000 bytes,an avg attachment size of 750k and let’s say that about 39% of msgs contain attachments and that the avg msgs per user is about 40 per day. Using simple calculations, I’m not doing them here, but do the math in Excel and then go and inform mgmt that a 60mb quota policy will cap our Tier1 strge at X(gb), and w/o a quota policy our msg store will grow to approx Y(tb) over a year, so the cost savings on storage are Y-X*cost per GB, “however”, and this is a “big” however, that you need to make a decision on; the net effect of the mail quota will also be that we will “lose” corporate access to approximately Z(mil) email records and about Z*.4 attachments, which are more than likely real business records & contracts within those email msgs. All in all,let’s say about 60mil potential business records and correspondence per yr. Is that OK?

Run the numbers you’ll see that they are astounding. Post Enron, and the heightened awareness of email archival, mixed with records mgmt, and legal discovery organizations applied quotas for no good reason other than it capped their msg store, storage was expensive, but no one ever looks at the “real” costs, if the msgs were (back then) deleted that would have probably been OK, in terms of reducing the cost of storage, but the reality is that files were moved to corporate shares and all that did was exasperate backup windows, and cause another group within the IT organization to buy bigger pipes, provision more hardware, etc. all to shorten those backup windows and keep them from running into productions hours, etc. It was a hidden mess.

Today’s scenario is much worse, emails are corporate records, and are discoverable. So if your organizations gets sued or joined in any litigation, your msg store becomes a big pool of discovery that attorneys will go after – and it is highly advisable to have some corporate controls, policies, end user training, etc. around the use of the messaging system. Without these let’s just say that your “goose is cooked”.

If you have a decent end user population size, look into email archival systems and create, yes you have to involve the business users, policies for email retention and deletion, and then you’ll have a waterfall effect to help manage storage. Do not do anything that encourages end users to make additional copies of msgs; these will become the bane of your existence.

There are many email archival companies that can provide you with advice. I work for one of them; feel free to contact someone at my company to understand what is out there that can help you.

Good Luck
Peter
December 2007