I have recently taken over the IT department of a small company,roughly 35 employees. They have used the exchange server to hold all their emails and most of the mailboxes around between 5 to 10 gb. The extreme is one 30gig mailbox. At my prior employer we created personal folders over a network share and everytime the mailbox reach 80 meg the user was responsible for off loading their emails to this personal folder. I now understand that this is an Exchange no no... (or is it?)What would be the best way to handle mailboxes of this magnitude to free up the exchange server. Or typically do most companies allow this must storage on the exchange server?Thanks!AT

You are going to have to get your users to delete some stuff. Backups/restores could take a really long time with mailboxes that big. 5GB is the highest limit allowed in the org i work for, but that's just for high level execs. Teach the users to manage data. Or if they want to spend the money, buy a kickass fast SAN.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319583 I guess i should provide directions on howto as well :-)

My issue is that most of our business is done via email and most need a retention of what has been done and or said. So they need around 3 years of retention. When u say get a bad *** san, you talking about allowing them to store more that 5gb but over the san connection? Or is this in a personal folder type format?Thanks again...AT

Just to keep performance up. If you are going to allow mailboxes that big, you'll need some fast disk and if exchagne 07 a ton of RAM. I'd really consider trying to cap it at 10GB and put it on some seriously fast disk. Also, as a side note if you are using cached mode outlook clients, a 30GB .ost file is going to kill desktop performance.

Knightly offers good advice. I maintain several client sites most of which run Exchange. When I run into these types of users, they usually dont need online access to their huge mailbox, they just want to know they can get it. You could archive 29 of his 30GB mailbox to a pst and just store that elsewhere. Dont mount it to his Outlook profile unless he needs something specific. Performance will still stink, and you need to backup the pst incase it becomes corrupt, but thats better than Outlook trying to manipulate that kind of size. just my .02