Where can I find evidence of company email mailbox limits?
I work for a company where a couple thousand people have email accounts. I’ve never run into an account limit which suggests it’s probably pretty high if there is one. I currently have about 250MB of email sitting on my account. We have an email retention policy, though. It’s obviously for Outlook users, hence the folder terminology. Here it is: 60 days: Inbox and Sent Items folders 24 months: Other folders, including any subfolders beneath the Inbox and/or Sent Items folders 24 months: Calendar, Notes, and Journal folders If an employee has a legal record retention order they get an exception to this policy. Basically everything gets sent to a cleanup folder and the next month the contents of that folder are wiped. If you’re a lazy bastard, you can drag the contents of the cleanup back into your archived mail indefinitely.
I’d say I work for more of a medium-sized company, but our limit is 50MB. Once you go over, you get an auto-generated warning everyday that stuff might be deleted, but I don’t think any auto-deleting ends up taking place. Regularly, they run a report and find the top 5 or so who are way over, and personally contact them and help them get rid of the extra. This usually works pretty well. For example, someone in the art department wasn’t deleting emails with attachments, even though they copied files to the server to work with them. So that dropped that mailbox from about 200MB to 2MB easily. Also, you could put in filters that automatically strip out, say video attachments, unless that is necessary to your business (and you can always modify filters for exceptions). And keep up with what the popular forwards of the day are, and just delete them without question from the mail server (helpful in getting rid of large video files, but I notice less emailing of videos since You Tube, etc.
When I started as a contractor at a certain evil empire 3 years ago, I think the standard mailbox allocation was 100MB. They also provided 1GB of space on a fileserver, but .pst files were forbidden on the fileserver. When I left a year an a half ago I think the mailbox side had been bumped up to 200MB. It was possible to get mailbox allocations up to 1 or 2GB, but you had to jump through a lot of hoops and there may have been a chageback. There are good business reasons for having large mailbox allocations (it’s a repository of institutional knowledge), and also good reasons for limiting mailbox allocations (risk management and it’s a crapy way to retain institutional knowledge — provided you have a better alternative).
I work at a Fortune 500 company. I believe the technical limit on accounts is 100 MB, but right now, my Lotus Notes mailbox is at 1393 MB and while the Janitor screeches at me every month about it, nothing happens. I know people with larger mailboxes than mine, too. We’re no longer supposed to archive email locally, so I just let Janitor auto-delete anything that I haven’t tagged with a retention tag.
