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

We currently have our warning size set at 500mb and our prohibit send set at 600mb. We use Symantec Enterprise Vault to archive e-mail to the vault server. This effectively moves the messages and attachments out of the Exchange database leaving a shortcut behind in the users mailbox. When a user double-clicks the shortcut, the original message with attachments is pulled from the vault server. The user mailboxes are kept to a reasonable size, and the user is able to keep important items. Retention policies can then be set on the Enterprise Vault side to control how long messages are retained. We are still in the process of defining the retention policies for our organization.