What's so hard about deleting emails?

The university limits everyone (minus the President and other higher staff members) to one gig of email storage. In all honesty, I think it should be two, but one seems to work for just about everybody. Our CFO just recently started hitting his limit and he's been here for years (and gets tons of emails). So of course we have the people who just don't want to delete their email. Setup archiving and they make it impossible to truly clear up space. Example would be a recent user wanting it set to six months. Really? You need to see an email from six months ago? Another user scoffed when I said empty your deleted emails folder. And I quote "I put things in there just in case I need it again". At this point I am ready to tell them where to go and how to get there, while allowing them to lose their ability to send and receive emails. Anyone else run into this issue?

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

Roguetadhg

I actually use my old [work] emails. Mostly to cover my arse. Any personal type emails I have it filtered into the "Junk". I keep work emails strictly for tickets, work conversations, etc.

Mostly as a way to prove to people, "No, I did not get a ticket from your supervisor about your computer issue. Nag them more."

J_86

I've had a few people tell me "well, my Gmail account can hold that much email!".

We still have people with PST files (no exchange) and I have run into people with 20GB PST files, which seems to be the limit when Outlook 2007 stops working. I can't for the life of me see why someone would need to keep 20GB of email!

jibbajabba

Education really. I noticed that most people don't understand that deleted items still count towards their allowance. Depending on company policy - there might even be a retention setup. In our case, even permanent deleted items can be recovered within 30 days - and mailboxes 90 days.

So what I did as first plan of attack was creating a document showing / explaining the difference. Also how to permanently delete mails (shift del or setting) and recover them using Outlook. And also how to create PST files if needed, to store deleted / sent items.

Got a LOT better.

In the same process I had to explain "Sent Items" - a lot - if not most people - forget about them ...

the_Grinch

It's fine to cover your arse, but archive it. The rep yesterday says he has a lot of attachments, but it's easier to keep them in email. Then he also handed me the "Gmail has x amount of space". Well go work for a multibillion dollar company and enjoy unlimited email storage. It peeves me that I offer several suggestions on how to properly do something, they tell me no to all of them, and then it is somehow IT's fault along with we are the department of no. I believe our retention policy is 30 days and I don't know what it is as far as legit backup goes. I promise you that if I manually went through his emails I would find lots of personal emails with pictures and what not. But hey that's an important email I might need six months from now....

higherho

Its the bloody email attachments =/ I'm not sure why people just dont store them off their emails and put them on the huge drives they have on ther laptops. Pretty much you have to setup a policy so people would follow.

Shanman

Hate to say it but this is a battle that can not be won. Your only defense is polices, procedures and education. I find for the most part people are going to do what they want no matter what education you offer to them. Have policies that are backed by management to cover your butt.

As far as management and higher ups you explain why they need to delete email but over all just deal with it because they are the kings and queens of the company.

the_Grinch

It's ironic because management never gives us any email issues. They say "Um I got this email saying I'm approaching my limit?" and we go in, setup the archive provide some quick education and they call it a day. It's the everyday users who seem to believe that every email they get is too important to do anything with....it really is astounding. I've been here for almost a year and have less then 100 megs of email space in use. I probably get 50 to 100 emails a day (work related) and still somehow manage to clear out those I don't need. But I understand that I rank just above the cockroaches and that my emails aren't important

FloOz

I work in legal IT and trust me nothing is worse that having hundreds of attorneys with unlimited email storage. I have seen mail boxes up to 7gbs in size. Literally takes like 5 hours to sync their outlook profiles when giving them a new pc...

NotHackingYou

Seen 60gb email files for entourage. I have the same affliction with not being able to delete email.

the_Grinch

I had a customer who archived, but thought his best bet was to store them on the server. Three 20 gig pst files being pulled across the network...had to rebuild them about 150 times and it would take hours.

I laid down the hammer and got the rep to let me move it to four months instead of six, zapped 400 mbs right off of his mailbox size.

blargoe

At one of my previous jobs, some user from back in the day had shown a few people how to create a listing of folders in their mailbox to sort their old emails. For some reason, he thought the best place to create this structure was the Deleted Items folder, since it wasn't being used for anything else...

My last job was heavy in marketing and engineering, and they loved to email revisions of engineering drawings, flyers, large jpegs, etc and use their email as a filing and file transfer system. No amount of edumacation seemed to help. We had a 30-day retention before moving to external archive, a special rule for >5MB items to archive after 14 days, and a 2GB Exchange limit, and even that wasn't enough.

wd40

You are lucky, all of you, our e-mail quota is 150 MB

..
Some people keep archiving, smarter people cleanup and then archive, the maximum archive size I have seen is less than 20 GB.

We have a strict no personal e-mail with pictures and funny power point presentations etc policy, so this cuts out 90% of the junk that people in other company's get.

DevilWAH

I have had to pull out emails from users that where used in a multimillion pound court case. And due to some of the work we do records have to be kept for 10years.

We put in an archiving system, that replaces archives the email and replace the email with a link to the storage, but 5gig+ mailboxes are common.

I have no issue with size or age as long as the users manage them well. One of the users with the largest mailbox, keeps it very will arranged and never asks for help or has issues. Its the untidy and untrained users that cause the issues.

there is nothing wrong with using email as a storage, why should users have to receive emails in one applicant but have to use a second to look for archived mail?? I don't want to be thinking... "oh did receive that 3 months ago or 4? because if it was 4 I will have to look in place X but if it was 3 I can look in Y.."

the_Grinch

In our case the archives are local psts and are backed up via a cloud app we use. Thus they just have to click on the archive folder within Outlook. Sucks to a point, but it is the constraints that we have. Plus a little organization and regular maintenance will resolve issues of finding mail.

Trifidw

Add another one on to the list, I've had someone ask for something for nothing to be done with this information. Then 2 years down the line refer back to it. Having those emails saves a lot of work, and it's not like it is major project work or anything.

At the moment I aim to keep emails for 3 years.

ptilsen

The key is that the mailbox size battle is to ensure the user experience is good. Educating your users that they are going to have bad email experience if they don't clean things up is key. No reasonable steps on the client side and network side are going to make extremely large mailboxes in Outlook perform well.

If your bigger concerns are server-side issues, then you need to take a different approach. Either the money to expand storage capacity must be allocated or you put in a hard limit. For most orgs, the server-side issues should not longer be the concern. Exchange can handle the mailboxes on good hardware, and good hardware is cheap. The time and effort spent keeping mailboxes small costs more than the storage itself. Now that might not be the case for a not-for-profit university, but in that case there should be no exceptions to the mailbox policy, forced auto-archive, user training and education on retention, etc.

The Gmail comparison is not a problem. Just explain that Gmail is web-based and Gmail doesn't work with Outlook the same way Exchange does. If they're okay with the webmail experience, take away Outlook and give them OWA. If they want Outlook on the workstation then Gmail is simply not a valid comparison, and it shouldn't be too hard to explain the differences.

tpatt100

I remember having to figure out how to manage PST files when I was doing Desktop support and we were on Exchange 5.0. I think there was the 2gb limit? I forgot. Anyways at one of my old jobs due to legal issues emails were deleted every 60 days.

People got used to using email as an information archive. I learned to export information into Evernote or Microsoft OneNote. Basically it was just emails that I learned something new and thought it would be important to save, a lot of times it became my "book of knowledge" I passed on to new employees.

Zartanasaurus

What else am I supposed to do with all my lolcats attachments?

Claymoore

Deleting emails is a waste of time. Stop with the draconian limits and policies and upgrade your mail server. Exchange 2010 is designed to run on cheap, local SATA disks - even JBOD, no RAID. Get your mail off the SAN and 15k FC disks. Exchange 2010 has a 90% reduction in disk I/O from 2003 and 2013 is even better at a 95-98% reduction from 2003 (I heard mixed numbers from the folks who attended MEC). The default mailbox size in Office 365 is 25 GB. With a higher license, there is no limit. I expect the default limit to be 100 GB in a couple of years. The default mailbox size in the Exchange 2010 role requirements calculator is 5 GB.

Stop forcing your users to waste their time trying to free up space by deleting 50k emails. Keep it all and use search instead of folders. I have 4 extra folders with rules, and that's more to manage how mail is delivered to my phone than to organize it in Outlook. Limits force people to create PSTs and those are a mess to manage. Keep the mail where you can manage it and take that burden away from your users.

ptilsen

Agreed Claymore, and that was my point, but in an enterprise with numerous offices and users demanding Outlook there can be legitimate challenges with huge mailboxes. Bandwidth is still a problem, but storage isn't.

paul78

Claymoore wrote: »

Deleting emails is a waste of time. Stop with the draconian limits and policies and upgrade your mail server.

I'm not sure that I totally agree with that sentiment. It's not entirely a simple matter of applying technology and getting more storage.

For some companies, there are very legitimate e-discovery concerns and the liabilities involved. Having a good email and data retention policy should be part of any IT governance structure for companies where there is concern with e-discovery laws.

ptilsen

That's fair, paul, but I think Claymoore's point is that mailbox sizes are not really an issue with Exchange 2010 and on; storage is cheap and even the cheapest storage is viable, and there's really no ROI in keeping users at ridiculously small mailboxes. Business needs for deleting old emails can still be valid, but keeping mailboxes at 1GB (what the thread is about) should not be a legitimate business need in many environments. Providing infrastructure to support reasonably large mailboxes is often cheaper than dealing with small ones. Retention policies are good, but 1GB limitations are indeed "draconian", IMO.

My own employer is still on a pure-Exchange-2003 environment, and we have very relaxed sizing restrictions. Only sites running out of storage that business units don't want to pay to upgrade right now have more restrictive settings. Even there, we'll see them shell out for the migration once it gets annoying enough. Users deleting emails is a huge time sink, and it comes at a high cost to productivity. Again, eventually they're going to say it will be cheaper to just upgrade to 2010 or 2013 and buy new equipment.

paul78

I absolute do see your points which are very valid. And thanks for clarifying some of the earlier comments which I overlooked.

I have always struggled with the concept that smaller mailboxes make staff less productive. The human tendency with mailbox sizes is that eventually the employee will reach the limit and the work effort to delete email doesn't seem to me to be less if the mailbox is bigger; the rate of incoming email to that employee is presumably constant.

For me - the idea that email should be used as a business workflow process is a bit of anathema. Email is a communications medium; I personally would like to see a cultural shift in my company to avoid using email as a content management system - but I digress

jibbajabba

Claymoore wrote: »

Deleting emails is a waste of time..

Whilst storage is cheap in principle, the reality is that in some companies, like mine, simple tasks like upgrading storage can become a nightmare. Once you got 10s of thousand of mailboxes on your Exchange server, 2010 or not, you end up quickly in a situation where you cannot just whack another disk in your server. At some point you need to swap the whole hardware, add expansions and the lot - that multiplied by the amount of DAG members.

Then there is backup / archiving .. In some areas such as ours, there are regulations where you have to keep mails for x amount of years. Some mail(boxes)s we need to keep for years for legal reason and so on. Some (LEGIT) mails, if not 80%, have to be kept indefinitely.

So you don't have just the problem of a. storing the mails, but b. to replicate / backup the mails and c. archive them.

Then you need to have a way to search / recover mails from archive quickly when again, legal requires it. Having billions of mails doesn't help. I don't know the exact number, but I believe we send / receive several million emails per day.

Although the latter won't matter if people delete mails due to journaling / so you still need to make sure people don't send nonsense, but I hope you get what I mean .. That is what some people forget btw. - journaling ... so each email sent / received is kept for whatever reason so you really have to start at the source - making sure those nonsense mails aren't even sent to begin with and external nonsense doesn't even hit your corporation in the first place.

Our mail infrastructure's storage consists of Petabytes worth of storage ... and that my friend - is far from cheap (or manage)....

SteveLord

I have poor memory when it comes to remembering conversations with people, so I keep nearly all emails to help that and as a record for much of my IT support.

4 years worth gets me a 9.2GB .ost file (outlook2010)

Until the exchange admins crack down, I won't do anything.

jmritenour

We use Microsoft's hosted Exchange services. $8 per month, per mailbox for 25GB of storage. And we don't have to deal with the hassle of managing & maintaining an Exchange server on premises.

wd40

one more thing about keeping large mailboxes / archives, sometimes you know you have a mail about a subject, but you don't know who sent it, when it was sent to you or the subject of the mail.

in this case having a clean mailbox / archive will save lots of time.

for example I try my best to leave the last mail in a mail chain, and delete the previous ones "exception if there are attachments in different mails in the chain"

also internal announcements, tickets that are more than 1 year old etc.

Claymoore

paul78 wrote: »

I have always struggled with the concept that smaller mailboxes make staff less productive. The human tendency with mailbox sizes is that eventually the employee will reach the limit and the work effort to delete email doesn't seem to me to be less if the mailbox is bigger; the rate of incoming email to that employee is presumably constant.

I think it takes being bitten by limits a few times before you hate them and their productivity robbing ways. At a previous company, we had a nag limit at 100 MB and a hard limit at 200 MB. It was a consulting firm with account execs, managers, and consultants always on the move - meetings, airports, client sites. We would be in the middle of revising an SOW or RFP that was due soon and communication would stop. Someone would be over their mail limit, thanks to the latest revision that was attached, and they would have to stop everything and clean up their mailbox. The only effective way to do that is through Outlook, so if they were on the road they would have to find wireless connectivity and fire up the laptop and spend the next 30 minutes to an hour sorting through old mail, archiving and deleting. That is a stupid position to be in for a multi billion dollar company.

The emails were rarely deleted, they were just moved to local PSTs. I had an autoarchive rule that moved mine, but a busy couple of weeks would put me over my limit before my 30 day archive rule would kick in. Now we have unmanaged PSTs instead of managed mailbox databases. We didn't have the same archive and retention rules my previous insurance company did, otherwise we would have been screwed. I am sure that I was one of the few who regularly backed up my laptop. One hard drive failure or laptop accident and years worth of communication would be gone.

the_Grinch

Well the biggest thing I can point out is that the university controls email here and sets the standard. Thus I have no ability to add a hard drive, upgrade exchange, or move to new equipment. Now I would agree that 1 gig isn't a lot if users used their work email for solely the work purpose. Obviously this is not the case here. While I am sure your child is beautiful, you don't need 100 megs worth of photos in your inbox. As far as work attachments, just as easy to keep a folder on your desktop or the server if there are files you use all the time. Our reps aren't getting so many emails that they can't take a few moments to clear out the useless stuff that they have. Plus, if it was a big issue then wouldn't everyone have it? Fact is we've only have about four or five users have a limit issue. When you have 100 people, four or five means they are lazy and there's no excuse for that.

ptilsen

It could be that there job roles are different, rather than they're lazy. Maybe they are lazy, but larger-than-normal mailboxes = lazy user is not a self-evident cause-effect relationship.

Just as an example, at one employer I worked for, the finance people all had huge mailboxes because they were emailing enormous spreadsheets and PDFs to each other instead of using a share, Sharepoint, an accounting system, etc. We got that fixed, but I didn't jump to the conclusion that they were lazier than others. I noticed that they were all in related roles and got the the bottom of the issue.