Throughout my career, I've encountered quite a few users who were email hoarders…
I'm managing a 100-user environment where users previously had 100mb quotas and a basic Cyrus IMAP/Postfix solution. That led to lots of locally-stored mail and the related problems with data-retention and lost mail following PC failures.
I promptly moved towards Exchange 2010 with MailArchiva (for discovery/archiving) and have been humming along for nearly a year in this setup. Everything inbound and out is archived and retained for compliance purposes. I initially set 3GB mailbox limits per user. A handful of users needed extra space for their working sets of email and were able to justify it, so I've made some exceptions. However, I have one particularly-bad (but important) user whose Inbox is presently 22,000 items, of which 14,000 are unread. It's probably not the number of messages, but the nature of the email; lots of reports, statements and large PDF attachments. This is also a Blackberry user, so I suspect that they read mail selectively, based on subject. The user has hit the 3GB limit for the first time and is unwilling to prune the mailbox. I took care of their 3,000 deleted items to keep mail flowing, but am at a loss on how to educate users on how to organize their email. I can institute stringent policies and be a hardass, or I could sit with the user and help sort and purge mail. Either way, it doesn't address the real issue of how to help with education.
Does anyone here have any tips on how to deal with this type of situation? I'd like some example guidelines. If you're using policies in your firm, what types of policies help keep people under control?
I find that people use mail differently, but it's a challenge to force them into a particular way of organization. I may not even be the best example, but I also know what to keep and what to delete.
Update – The first battle is over, in that I've been able to keep the user under the Exchange mailbox limit by some reasonable pruning. However, I went to rebuild the user's computer and discovered a 17GB local PST file with just over 6,500 subfolders! The user had been copying (not moving) messages into an array of subfolders; sometimes with single messages being copied/filed into multiple folders. Underscores (_) and prefixes (a-z) were used to control the display order of the folders within the file! The user had also been CC'ing themselves on outbound email so as to have an Inbox record of messages to later be filed into one of the local PST's subfolders. This is an absolute misuse of the technology and is a scary way to organize company data. I am handing it over to the owners to address the situation, as it's now a company liability.
Best Answer
This may be a pure management issue, but in my experience this kind of decision devolves to the sysadmin staff to justify and enforce all too often. Because of this, it is my job as the sysadmin to convince management that there is a problem here and it should be taken seriously, and to posit management mechanisms that may be useful.
One of my old employers had a GroupWise system, which at the time didn't have any quota mechanisms in it (this was a while ago, GW has had it for some time now). So ultimately we resorted to a peer-pressure method. Each month we'd print off a report of the $X largest mail-boxes in each department and send the reports off to the office-managers. Within two months the top-5 list of largest mailboxes had a much smaller average size.
Some methods I've found useful for convincing management to pay attention to this issue:
Define the cost of mail storage
If you're getting the "but Google does it" pushback, start building spread-sheets that show how much mail costs. Managers understand cost. You, or the people you buy things through, have the costs for your server hardware, software, AV software, and other related costs. From this you can assign a dollars-per-MB number for mail storage. This allows you to give a decently good dollar value for a 3GB mailbox versus a 200MB mailbox.
This, by the way, is why you learned algebra back in school.
This can go one of three ways:
Produce mail system upgrade costs
If the above is beyond your mad spreadsheeting skills, producing upgrade plans for keeping ahead of your storage consumption curve is a good way to at least get the conversation started. When they see bigbigmoney for upgrades, they'll ask why. And then you'll tell them. When they ask how they can avoid this cost, mention providing downward pressure on the big mail users.
I've done both of the above to justify simple storage purchases. The same techniques work for email, where you've got an entire application stack sitting on top of your storage/backup infrastructures. Dollars (or currency-of-choice) per unit is a great method of highlighting costs and the perils of overindulgence. Sometimes it can cause very significant strategic changes (see also, to the cloud!). Sometimes it can jar loose resources.
Politically speaking, it's a good idea to provide some suggestions for how to provide downward pressure for email consumption. But that's all they are, suggestions to the management who has to actually implement them or convince other managers to do so.