MailStreet Cares About Your Company's Data

MailStreet implements mailbox limits, or quotas, to protect you and your company’s valuable data.  Although some of our competitors opt to offer “multi-gigabyte” or “unlimited mailbox sizes” to their customers, this is not a responsible practice nor is it recommended from a technical standpoint.  Any trained Microsoft Exchange Engineer would certainly advise against this practice.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s own TechNet resource specifically recommends against unlimited mailbox sizes stating that:

Having sufficient capacity is critical...Knowing the amount of data an end-user is allowed to store in their mailbox allows you to determine how many users can be housed on the server… If a hard limit is not set on mailbox quotas, it will be difficult to estimate how much capacity you will need. - and - When a database disk runs out of space, the database will go offline. When a transaction log disk runs out of space, it will cause all of the databases in that storage group to go offline. Provisioning additional space is often hard to do quickly, and performing offline compaction to reclaim space can take a long time. In most cases, running out of disk space results in an interruption of availability of one or more databases for a period of time that typically exceeds most recovery time objectives (RTO).   - Microsoft Technet   Planning Disk Storage – Exchange 2007

Other information on this topic is posted by Ross Smith, a Messaging System Engineer who works for Microsoft on his Microsoft Exchange Team Blog:

Many customers tell me that they do not impose mailbox and/or message size limits on the vast majority of their user population.  This poses a problem because you will never be able to adequately design a storage subsystem or maintain the desired database size limits, let alone meet any service level agreements that may be in place. Ultimately, the lack of mailbox size limits and message size limits can lead to instability in the messaging architecture. Oh, and I consider an outrageously large limit (to quiet the restless natives) the same as the lack of mailbox and message size limits. Without a message and mailbox size limits, a hacker (whether internal or external) can easily implement a denial of service attack by sending messages with large attachments, ultimately using all available resources on the Exchange servers, thereby causing system failure. The lack of quota management effectively limits any type of future capacity planning (e.g. cannot predict future database growth).  In particular, if you have an SLA that dictates a backup/restore window you may not be able to meet that goal, due to not being able to control the database size metric. - Ross Smith   www.msexchangeteam.com

Although extraordinarily large and/or unlimited mailbox sizes may appear attractive on the surface, the fact of the matter is that providers, who operate this way are taking unnecessary risks with your company’s data.  

Alternatives to Large Mailboxes

MailStreet offers two safe alternatives to having extraordinarily large or unlimited sized Exchange mailboxes.   These include:

Local archiving and backup of Outlook data
This can be accomplished automatically at periodic intervals via the Microsoft Outlook software. The system will automatically, at specified times, export old data to a local Personal Folder File (PST).   This file can be easily burned to a CD-Rom for safekeeping.  Any MailStreet Technical Support Engineer can assist you with this process.

MailStreet's Archiving and Compliance solution
For more advanced requirements, MailStreet offers its Archiving and Compliance solution.   This solution seamlessly integrates with MailStreet Hosted Exchange Server capturing incoming, internal and outgoing email messages and copies this data to a third party data repository for a minimum period of three years.  This solution comes in a basic archiving package or can be upgraded to include compliance features for businesses with strict regulatory compliance needs such as Health Care and Financial services.

Click here for more information on MailStreet's Archiving and Compliance solution.