Mailbox Size

I hate being the mailbox Nazi at work. Every couple days I send out a mail telling people to shrink their email box. Some people are very upset that they have tried to shrink their mailbox and it just keeps growing. I have to attempt to explain that it is an ongoing strategy to keep the mailbox under control.

The strategy is to keep your mail under control. Some tactics are below.

• Personal Folders

  • Make personal folders

  • Create rules to move mail from your mailbox to the personal folders automatically

  • Get in the habit of moving things to the personal folders

• Know what to delete and when it is gone

  • Empty your trash

  • Figure out where your backup trash folders are and empty those

• Learn how to check your mailbox size

• Get important information out of email

  • Rely more on the archive server.

  • Don't rely on searching your inbox for important information. Keep it elsewhere..

There are probably a dozen more bullets I'm not remembering here.

Microsoft Exchange Server is a nightmare to support. Email was one of the first killer apps of the Internet and thus, it was the learning experience for the first generation of software engineers. The concept of email is flawed. It is too easy on the user to send an email. It is too cheap. If they had charged for email from day one, the current internet would look much different that it does today. Email is a vast pile of one way of communicating that has been comity-directed to death. It has suffered scope creep. It has been taken advantage of and turned in to a place where people fear to tread.

The licensing for Exchange server is ridiculous on top of everything else. It is more expensive to give people more space on your own server on your own hard drive. This is insane. There are other options for an email server besides MS Exchange. The only trouble is that they are not MS Exchange. Many of the utilities and fancy email related crap is designed to only work with MS Exchange and Outlook. Who's fault is this?

I even put together some docs on this subject and sent them around. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of sending an email with attachments complaining about mailbox size. I don't have any choice. This is just how work is done. We depend greatly on our email to do every day business. I understand how difficult it is for people to track their email size and worry about it when there is so much else going on.

You don't even need to use your inbox. You can set up rules to move all of your mail straight off the server to a local folder. If anything happens, your mail is backed up on an archive server. The archive server is a pain to use, but it works. you can search the archive. you can search local folders. Make local backups. Move the important stuff out of email. What makes you think your email is more safe than you hard drive anyway?

One thing I cannot provide for people is a web folder in which to hold information. People tell me they have really important information they need access to outside of work. This is perfectly valid. These things happen and need to be dealt with. Maybe your email is just not the proper tool for the job. Maybe we need to invest in something.

What do other people use. Well, it seems like every other small company is using online email. I spoke with a friend who works for a company with about twenty people. They use some service online that is similar to GMail. They pay per person and per amount of space used. They have extra accounts for special needs and distribution lists. That sounds to me like a plan. I bet they spend less per year than the cost of an MS Exchange server. The trouble is, that stuff and services that only work with MS Exchange do not work with their service either.

I believe GoDaddy offers some kind of email server package. I may look in to the cost of this. One would have to have internet access to get to that sort of thing which is not always an option. There are a million options out there that won't work the same as our current setup. That doesn't make them bad or wrong.