Where can I find evidence of company email mailbox limits?

May 25, 2006 4:23 AM

I need evidence of mailbox limits in use in large companies.

My (small-med) company allows for 500MB mailboxes on the mail server. As the new IT manager, this is killing me. The people who implemented the 500MB limit are gone and i can do what i want. Over the next year I will decrease it to 200MB - still large but a 60% reductionoverall and it will solve other problems (backing up 100GB files isnt that easy) especially as we are not exactly rolling in cash.

I could do with the policies of 'large' companies - or at least some pointers to web published guidelines, anything really I can forward to the dissenters who will really kick up a fuss over it. I've got enough to deal with and I just want some where to refer people to if they think my policy is unreasonable (I dont think it is).

Thanks!

posted by daveyt to computers & internet (37 comments total)

i work for a US fortune 500 insurance company. we get 50MB mailboxes, auto deletion of all content over 90 days, although anything stored in exchange departmental exchange folders isn't counted against that limit.

Working in IT, I'll say that this limit is challenging at times, but an unexpected benefit is that the lower limit has forced me to become a lot more efficient in managing incoming email.
posted by gage at 4:33 AM on May 25, 2006

500MB is a lot - I work for a Fortune 500 as well, and our mailbox size is limited to 150, they'll up it to 200MB if you pay them $20. I don't know if the $20 is out of my pocket or my group's pocket, I haven't tried, I just archive (yes, we use lotus notes still - blah)
posted by echo0720 at 5:04 AM on May 25, 2006

I work at a major telecom and ours are limited to 50 MB. A lot of our internal documentation approaches 10 MB, so we have constant issues with full mailboxes.
posted by daveleck at 5:38 AM on May 25, 2006

We were originally given 400MB total, but that is being lowered to 150MB with 10MB per e-mail limits and 180 day autodelete. We were constantly getting e-mails asking us to delete large items, as the servers can't really handle the load. E-mail me your e-mail address and I can get you the data from our internal IT bulletin if you would like it.
posted by blackkar at 5:38 AM on May 25, 2006

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.)
posted by mikepop at 5:45 AM on May 25, 2006

Our arbitrary limit is between 100MB and 200MB. The users want to be able to get to email with a browser when they're away from their desktops, and that means 3-5 day retention on the server. The sad state of affairs is that half of the mail is spam, and a good part of the other half contains large attachments, for which there are better transfer mechanisms for, but not as transparent. But I digress.
posted by SteveInMaine at 5:56 AM on May 25, 2006

At my old corp we had 100 MB limits for employees. We do let the "bigwigs" go way way way beyond that.
posted by k8t at 6:01 AM on May 25, 2006

I previously worked for a company while they instituted a 200MB limit on mailboxes (later dropped to 100MB, I believe). Before doing any such thing, please consider the human costs of forcing people to manage their mail - I know several people who had to spend a couple hours a week just saving and deleting stuff in order to keep under the cap, and a couple hours a week is a couple of hundred dollars a week in employee costs. Mail filesize controls are the kind of thing IT departments come up with to shave their costs without any particular regards to the productivity demands this places on the people who actually receive all that mail. It looked good in the IT cost reports, but I can't help but feel it was bad for the bottom line overall.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:03 AM on May 25, 2006

In 1999 I was in Mail Engineering (at a large pharmaceutical company whose third name sounds like "squid") and moved 15,000 users from cc:Mail to Netscape Enterprise Server, and we gave them all 1GB quotas, because our surveys had determined that if we gave people low quotas, they would just save their emails to their local computer, or, worse, to floppies... which we'd then have to back up anyway -- and have to help them find when they lost track of.

At AT&T Easylink I had a 750MB quota.
posted by dmd at 6:04 AM on May 25, 2006

250MB at my large US firm. At my previous employer (superlarge firm), they did away with quotas because "our back of the envelope math suggests that once all costs are factored in, it's cheaper to buy the storage than it is to lose the work hours spent cleaning mailboxes (by endusers)."
posted by Kwantsar at 6:16 AM on May 25, 2006

At one of the largest telecom companies in the world, the standard limit is 40MB, but it's an open secret that you can get more space (up to 150MB or so) by simply calling IT and asking for it.
posted by jammer at 6:27 AM on May 25, 2006

I've always wondered why small companies don't just use gmail for their email. You get over 2gb per mail box. You can POP. It's free. If you get sued, you're protected from having to dig all of that mail out (because you can't get to it). There are downsides (HR can't spy on you, the company can't close the account when sales people leave).

If that seems too radical for you, why not outsource it altogether? I see a LOT of large companies outsourcing various parts of their email (or at least the spam/virus bits). This would make a charge-back scheme very easy to implement internally, because the cost per head for email service would now be trivial to calculate.

I have to say that I agree with the posters who think there should be no (or very liberal) limits to mail box size. Why should anyone care about your backup problems? If email helps the company get revenue (and I can't think of any other reason to have an email system), who are you to make it a burdensome task to keep on top of? Let sales people sell, not sit there and sort through their Inboxes. God forbid you should be bouncing customer's emails because someone went on vacation or something. It just sounds like really bad business.

As far as trying to delete 90 day old mail, go talk to your legal department. They probably have some thoughts here.
posted by popechunk at 6:27 AM on May 25, 2006

Christ almighty. I have a 10 MB limit at my medium firm. And I get upwards of 300 work related emails a day. And I keep lots of them. One cutesy picture 2 MB email triggers my "your mailbox is full" warning. You guys are lucky.
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:29 AM on May 25, 2006

I worked for a huge company (one of the top 5 largest UK employers) which had ~30,000 email (Lotus Notes) users. Mail file size limit was 75mb, although the auditing was pretty lax. Every now and then there was a blitz and users were reminded of the policy: basically "this is what your business unit has agreed with IT, this is the amount of disk space they're paying for, here's how you reduce your mailfile size."

Mainly people just needed educating on using locally stored archives and above all using one of the file servers to share their huge Excel files, rather than bouncing them around in emails.

Anyone who didn't like it was referred to their departmental budget holder, who in almost every case would tell them to put up and shut up (or very rarely, pay for special treatment in terms of extra storage). Can't you simply notify the departmental heads in your company that disk + backup tape space=money, and the new limit is being introduced for budgetary reasons? Any employees who think 200mb is unreasonable (and it's not) can be told to speak to their management about it, rather than hassling you.
posted by boosh at 6:46 AM on May 25, 2006

I work for a Fortune 100 technology company, and we have 40 MB limits. One attachment can put me over the limit, easily.

This is balanced by having an amazing intranet system that allows us to share files and author sites very easily.

Before we were acquired we were a startup of approximately 75 employees, and we had 100MB limits. Most users with heavy email loads learned to redirect incoming mail to a PST, which we would then backup via Backup Exec. We were running Exchange 5.5 at the time.
posted by kableh at 7:07 AM on May 25, 2006

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.
posted by mikeh at 7:37 AM on May 25, 2006

We have 20K users on Exchange. Limits are 50MB with possiblity of upgrade to 100MB if you can convince the Admins that you need more space. Convincing takes at least four weeks as you have to show that you are keeping your mailbox clean and it is still hitting the 50MB limit.
posted by Mitheral at 7:43 AM on May 25, 2006

Government worker here, we have 3500MB and possibly around 2000-plus email accounts. I'm not sure what the system is, it is custom designed, I believe.
posted by JJ86 at 8:03 AM on May 25, 2006

Fortune 500 company, also 50MB quotas.
We're incredibly lax about enforcement though. It's not uncommon to have 500MB to 1Gig of mail.
I know of a few users who have 5Gig mail files.
(Lotus Notes)
posted by Eddie Mars at 8:04 AM on May 25, 2006

Big US firm here. Our inbox limit is 50mb, up from 20mb last year. But I probably have 3 or 4 GB of email saved in .pst files that are saved on my portion of the personal network drive.
posted by mullacc at 8:08 AM on May 25, 2006

Gov't - Defense Department here. 50MB for everybody, 100MB for the senior execs.
posted by fixedgear at 8:17 AM on May 25, 2006

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.
posted by eilatan at 8:26 AM on May 25, 2006

popechunk, it's my understanding that gmail is for personal use only...
posted by sauril at 8:26 AM on May 25, 2006

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).
posted by Good Brain at 9:55 AM on May 25, 2006

As a few people have mentioned, having a smaller mailbox means that users are managing data locally rather than having it managed by IT on the server side. While it may shave IT's buget, it definitely hurts productivity and reduces data integrity, which has a much higher cost long-term.
posted by gregariousrecluse at 10:11 AM on May 25, 2006

Daveyt,
You want to decrease the limit to 200MB to simplify your problems? Tell me, is the rest of the company there to make your job easier, or are you supposed to be making everyone else more efficient? If I owned the company, I'd fire you for your attitude! Sorry to be so harsh, but this is such false economy: you are going to cost employees a few hours a week, just to save your department a few $K per year.

(We have an official 500MB limit, but many people have several GB, without punishment. Not keeping the customers happy - now, that gets punished.)
posted by mediaddict at 10:12 AM on May 25, 2006

Over the next year I will decrease it to 200MB - still large but a 60% reductionoverall and it will solve other problems (backing up 100GB files isnt that easy) especially as we are not exactly rolling in cash.

You are an IT manager, learn to do your job.
posted by b1tr0t at 11:01 AM on May 25, 2006

Oh, I should also mention that UPenn.edu has a 10MB quota for students. The result of this is that all incoming students immediately forward their mail to Hotmail/Yahoo/GMail. Most don't know that some of those allow you to send mail "as" some other address. Result: 90% of Penn students don't never use a upenn.edu address. Penn's email administrators are happy with the situation, because they don't have to do their jobs...
posted by dmd at 11:53 AM on May 25, 2006

At my previous place of employment -- a Fortune 100 outfit with about 150,000 employees of whom maybe 70,000 were email users -- Exchange repository quotas defaulted to 100M (up from 25M in prior years), could be expanded in 25M increments for a somewhat hefty interdepartmental fee, and were very frequently extended well over a gig for upper middle management. Total active repository storage across the company was measured in terabytes, multiplied by the substantial replication, backup, and retention needs.

Despite (or perhaps because of the expensive onus of) the strict data retention requirements of a regulated industry, active storage in the repository was heavily discouraged and users were educated about taking advantage of local storage. This led to some very unfortunate data management practices (including some data loss incidents that made the national news) especially within departments that were politically allergic to interdepartmental charges, but controlled what was essentially a bottomless pit of storage demand. Even with the strict quotas, the email infrastructure of this company was a multi-million dollar investment and demand was boundless.

As someone who'd been on both sides of the fence as a consumer as well as a supplier of the service at that company, I have to say: a downward trend in default storage quota suggests piss poor planning on the part of an IT director. I'm sorry you inherited a mess, but reducing services only masks -- temporarily at best -- your infrastructure problems. It doesn't fix them.
posted by majick at 12:34 PM on May 25, 2006

You are an IT manager, learn to do your job.

You aren't in IT, I take it?

- For a long time, Exchange databases were limited in size due to filesystem constraints.
- Fixing errors in databases takes an increasing amount of time as size grows.
- Backup times increase greatly as size grows.
- Using email as a catch-all file repository adds an additional layer of complexity and overhead for no tangible benefit.

It's admittedly been a while since I've admined an Exchange server, and I'm not in IT any more, but if you haven't dealt with day to day issues of IT comments like these are misguided.

Or maybe I'm just lucky to have worked in IT for a department full of engineers.
posted by kableh at 12:49 PM on May 25, 2006

kableh: Exchange has gotten a LOT better about large mailbox files. I think the limit is now in the terabytes. So, that might not be an issue. It's backups & disk space that might be a PITA for this guy.

If you do change quotas to something lower, firewall off gmail from your company. A previous employer I worked at had a problem with that - users thought "300mb? That's not enough, GMAIL gives me over a gig!" and they started forwarding corporate (and confidential) emails to their personal gmail accounts. Total violation of corporate policy.

So, be careful when you change their quotas around. It might blow up at you..
posted by drstein at 1:44 PM on May 25, 2006

Some great answers thanks, 50MB seems to be the popular amount. To those suggesting that I should be fired for my attitute and to do my job, firstly Thanks! I always thought i was incompentent and now I'm sure I am. Very constructive advice from those guys but to everyone else, genuine thanks.

In the real world however, its not about saving IT a few dollars, its the fact the server is practically full and there is zero cash available for the next year to extend it or back it up fully. I dont believe that people should be allowed free reign to have ever-expanding mailboxes. It's highly inefficient in several ways and it will do no harm to force people to manage their own data. Its time non computer/data savvy people learned about the resources they consume.

I have two choices - let it continue, or do something about it. If i let it continue, it will do so faster than i can do anything about it and then we will have no email system and if anything will get me fired its that.

Or... and this is for the twats with the unhelpful advice - I can continue with the plan (that has been board-approved and i have full encouragement from them) and SAVE a few dollars for the company. I didnt ask for advice on how I should do my job, just for some reference material which many have supplied, once again, thanks to all who did.
posted by daveyt at 8:32 AM on May 26, 2006

So, in other words, you decided to ignore what everyone said?


gage 50
echo0720 200
daveleck 50
blackkar 150
mikepop 50
steveinmaine 150
k8t 100
jacquilynne 100
dmd 750 outlier dropped
kwantsar 250
jammer 40
cunninglinguist 10
boosh 75
kableh 40
mikeh 250
mitheral 50
jj86 3500 outlier dropped
eddiemars 50
mullacc 50
fixedgear 50
eilatan 100
goodbrain 200
mediaaddict 500 outlier dropped
majick 100


Ok, let's drop the big outliers - mediaaddict (500), jj86 (3500), and myself (750).

mean: 100mb
upper 95% mean: 133mb
lower 95% mean: 67mb

Yep, 50MB sure seems to be the popular amount.

Why do people Ask Metafilter if they're just going to ignore what they're told when they don't like the answer?
posted by dmd at 9:29 AM on May 26, 2006

Yes, I know 50 was the mode.

However, there were only 7 "50" answers, and 11 answers greater than 50 (14 if you count the 3 outliers).

Only 3 answers were lower than 50, of which one was "10", which seems a bit ridiculous (I, at least, routinely get single emails larger than 10mb.)
posted by dmd at 9:33 AM on May 26, 2006

nope, definitely not ignoring its very useful. Its just it annoys me when i ask a question and a different, unasked one gets answered.

I did say the most popular result was 50MB which you also pointed out! I'm using all the answers above as justification to my plan.

thanks again everyone.
posted by daveyt at 7:43 AM on May 27, 2006

"answering a different, unasked question" - doesn't that just mean we are suggesting you take off your blinders and look at the problem differently?
posted by mediaddict at 10:45 AM on May 27, 2006

everyone: "I don't think your plan works."

how you're going to quote everyone: "I ... think your plan works."

It's like a movie review!
posted by dmd at 7:59 PM on May 27, 2006