Hello all I would really appreciate some assistance from the Microsoft Exchange community. I am seeking information on whether or not you have implemented mailbox limits and/or retention policies at your company and if so, what those policiesare. At my current company we have allowed our users to have no mailbox restrictions and have several mailboxes that are in excess of 5 gigabytes or more. From an architectural/operational perspective there has always beena full understanding that this is notanywhere near desirable and in fact has a negative impact on performance etc. What I am trying to do is gather information on what the industry is doing in respect tomailbox limits and email retention so that we can put together an effective business case with some data detailing industry trends. We have already looked at positions from Gartner and Forrester but I believe that there is more value in real world responses. I am particularly interested in hearing from companies in the oil and gas space but any response is welcome. Thank you in advance for any assistance that is provided. Clarence Washington Jr.Infrastructure ArchitectDevon Energy, Business Information & TechnologyPartner, Communicate, and Deliver

Strictly speaking, large mailboxes with high growth rateshave negative impacts only if you don't have the $$$ to spend on enough storage and servers. Large mailboxes with small growth rates effectively have their own cap on what's required to support them. I've been in environments with no limits, and environments with very strict limits. As long as you can budget the resources required to accomodate the growth in mailbox storage, then you won't have any problem. You need to switch from provisioning servers with server performance in mind, to provisioning servers with storage and database limits in mind, but that's not too hard. Of course, having no mailbox limits + high growth rates = high $$$ required for ever expanding storage and server counts. If mailbox limits (combined with a strict "no .pst file" enforcement) are not possible, then you may want to consider the various Exchange archiving solutions available. For around $70/user (software costs), you can get email archiving, journaling (if necessary), and archive search. Archive those attachments to cheaper disk, arrest the growth in your exchange databases, and provide some search and discovery features, for not a great deal of money.