Outlook Auto Archiving

[Stereodude]

This really should be that hard, but leave it to Microsoft to make this incomprehensible...

My company purges e-mails older than ~90 days from the Exchange server about once a month. They also sent out all the laptops in the field set to auto archive every 7 days messages older than 6 months. :scratch:

I changed it to 3 months so I didn't lose my old e-mail, but Auto Archiving still doesn't seem to work. I know messages are vanishing from my inbox (due to the exchange server purges), but they don't show up in the archives. (I am clicking yes when Auto Archive prompts me to run.) For example, I can see messages in my Sent Items folder that are from 10/1/2010 (clearly older than 3 months), and there's not a copy of them in my Archive Folders.

I tried manually running Auto Archiving with it set to 12 weeks and it still doesn't move any of my e-mails. It only moves two types of messages. 1) Synchronization Log's and 2) Calendar replies (accepting or declining).

I spend some time reading online and googling, but couldn't find any sort of explanation for what it does on my PC. :crap:

HELP?

 

[Mercutio]

Start another, local .pst. Copy your crap into that.

 

[Stereodude]

I don't want to manually move stuff, especially when it's all nicely sorted.

It looks like the problem is how MS is measuring the dates or something. When set to 10 weeks (ie: 70 days) it archived e-mails earlier than 10/8/2010. That's 102 days, not 70. It looks like it adds an extra month? :scratch:

However, it archived calender related things earlier than 11/8/2010. Which is odd considering the settings are the same for all folders.

 

[Mercutio]

There's a copy function in Outlook. It works just like copying stuff that's not retarded Outlook data. If stuff is sorted, it stays sorted. It just winds up in a different folder.

I am as willfully ignorant of Outlook as I am allowed to be, and I'm not sure what's going on with Auto-archive, but it sounds like there's an extra-retarded client setting someplace. Of course, half the time I say something like that, it turns out Outlook is retarded in that way by design.

 

[ddrueding]

Is there anything that stops you from setting auto-archive to something like 7 days? I'm with Merc on this; as soon as Google started offering to host our domain mail for free, I jumped ship.

 

[LunarMist]

I do it manually.

 

[Stereodude]

Is there anything that stops you from setting auto-archive to something like 7 days?

I can set it to anything I want. However, I'm not sure I want to keep stuff on the exchange server for such a short period of time. That would have the effect of removing messages from my Blackberry as well. :x

I'm with Merc on this; as soon as Google started offering to host our domain mail for free, I jumped ship.

That's not exactly an option for me. :nono:

 

[Howell]

I believe there is an auto-archive setting on each folder that overrides the global setting by default. My information is a few years old and so may not be relevant.

 

[blakerwry]

as soon as Google started offering to host our domain mail for free, I jumped ship.

How much do you pay them to host your mail for free? ;- )

And for how many users?

 

[Mercutio]

$50/user/year really isn't that expensive for email services given the administrative overhead of things like spam filtering and costs for the kind of hardware needed to host any kind of grown-up Exchange installation.

 

[Stereodude]

I believe there is an auto-archive setting on each folder that overrides the global setting by default. My information is a few years old and so may not be relevant.

There is, but I clicked the apply to all folders button, so any that were different would have been updated.

Best I can tell there's a phantom 31 day extension to what you set it to. So, I just need to set it to 2 months instead of 3 and it should do what I want. :bibber:

This is Outlook 2007 if it matters.

 

[blakerwry]

Just wondering since my company also competes in that space. We charge significantly less and offer a similar suite - IMAP, POP, SMTP, Webmail, SpamFilter, Mailing lists, etc. Of course, we don't have google's snazzy interface, but if you're using a mail client that doesn't really matter. We are also much more willing to work with people, adding IP exceptions or allowing very large messages (100MB+) - does google limit to 40MB on hosted domains like they do on free accounts?

Postini (Now owned by Google) used to offer spam filtering between $0.50 and $0.25 per user per month to larger customers (small ISPs) from what I've heard. The real expense is in the disks; mail is highly transactional, with many thousands of very small files. We've always used 15k SCSI/SAS and BBU RAID, which keeps costs up. I've seen some providers try to get away with SATA disks - it usually ends poorly (I've seen various "outages" caused by slow disks, sometimes they go on for days).

 

[time]

Blakerwry, I'm interested. How do you compare with Fastmail?

 

[ddrueding]

How much do you pay them to host your mail for free? ;- )

And for how many users?

Up to 50 users it is completely free. If you have more than 50 users it is $50/user/year.

We are currently considering breaking down the company to different domains to keep each under 50 users and not pay anything.

 

[Mercutio]

Google Apps Premier also offers ActiveSync and BES support for no additional charge. Hosted Exchange with either one of those two components is usually $13 - $15/month/user based on my research.

What blakerwry's company presumably delivers is far better customer service, but I doubt they have an army of network engineers and dozens of datacenters to deal with customer issues, either.

 

[Adcadet]

I just adjusted my Autoarchive settings on my work account for a specific folder and it worked as expected.

 

[blakerwry]

Blakerwry, I'm interested. How do you compare with Fastmail?

Actually, we use the same IMAP software and I've corresponded with the operator of Fastmail a few times in the past. Bron is actively pursuing the development of the Cyrus IMAP software at a pace faster than ever before - it's really exciting to be able to see this in OSS.

Fastmail specializes in email though. We provide all types of services (DNS, Auth, DHCP, WWW, Engineering, Administration, Monitoring, Helpdesk, PC repair, customer issue tracking, etc).

We don't typically offer single accounts, and prefer to cater to businesses and ISPs instead. I'm sure our pricing becomes more attractive if you have 1000+ users.

Google Apps Premier also offers ActiveSync and BES support for no additional charge. Hosted Exchange with either one of those two components is usually $13 - $15/month/user based on my research.

We stay away from Exchange, and typically only use Windows servers when absolutely necessary. We have not tried to use third party tools to mimic Exchange's ActiveSync or BES; I'm not sure how google does it at any scale. My blackberry seems to work just fine with IMAP. iPhones and other mobile clients also appear to work well with the standard protocols already out there without resorting to Exchange plugins. I've never administered an Exchange server, and from what I've heard I probably don't want to.

What blakerwry's company presumably delivers is far better customer service, but I doubt they have an army of network engineers and dozens of datacenters to deal with customer issues, either.

Absolutely. Our customers can email us directly or call and get me or another individual with access to the server on the first ring. If it's after hours they can leave a message and we'll call them back. I tried Fastmail's support last year and it was absolutely horrible... I gave up. I have no idea if google has anyone you can call, and what good it would be... can they restore an accidentally deleted email (or entire mailbox), can they troubleshoot a network or mail server interop issue?

We only have 2 data centers (one is co-located), but we're multi-homed to two separate providers (3 internet connections) and use fully redundant servers and network equipment; We haven't had an outage that affected our network (or mail) for quite some time.

 

[Mercutio]

There is a class of business users, whom I simply call Douchebags, for whom simultaneous mail delivery and address book syncing are for some reason absolutely critical business needs. All that crap is tied in to having an Exchange ecosystem to deal with E-mail, so there's a whole class of wanna-be douchebags driving business systems to that platform so their companies can spend even more money making sure they get their Fantasy Football league updates on their phones at exactly the same time they show up on their PC.

 

[Howell]

Why would anyone want to maintain a central repository for their contacts that will sync wirelessly to their phone. That's just crazy!
Yes, gmail will sync mail, calendar and contacts as it implements the activesync protocol but that anyone would want that is crazy. Just crazy!

 

[Mercutio]

Why would anyone want to maintain a central repository for their contacts that will sync wirelessly to their phone. That's just crazy!

The price premiums are on "push" delivery and wireless sync, and those premiums are insane. They create vendor lock-in to a really lousy software platform and the justification is, what? That some douche can't be bothered to stick his phone on a cradle for 90 seconds to sync up with his email client every couple days? Because he can't wait four minutes for his phone to poll an IMAP server? I agree. It is crazy.

 

[ddrueding]

My Google Apps mail hits my phone before it updates the webpage in front of me. I wish it was quicker on the address updates, though (an hour would be fine, but it can be a day).

 

[LunarMist]

There is a class of business users, whom I simply call Douchebags, for whom simultaneous mail delivery and address book syncing are for some reason absolutely critical business needs. All that crap is tied in to having an Exchange ecosystem to deal with E-mail, so there's a whole class of wanna-be douchebags driving business systems to that platform so their companies can spend even more money making sure they get their Fantasy Football league updates on their phones at exactly the same time they show up on their PC.

I always receive the BB e-mail anywhere from a few seconds to nearly a minute before the e-mail arrives in Outlook. Is that abnormal?

 

[Howell]

My Google Apps mail hits my phone before it updates the webpage in front of me. I wish it was quicker on the address updates, though (an hour would be fine, but it can be a day).

My contact updates never take that long. 10 seconds at most.

 

[Mercutio]

I always receive the BB e-mail anywhere from a few seconds to nearly a minute before the e-mail arrives in Outlook. Is that abnormal?

Yes, but that probably means your Exchange server has some excessive mail processing and/or routing happening.

 

[Howell]

The price premiums are on "push" delivery and wireless sync, and those premiums are insane. They create vendor lock-in to a really lousy software platform and the justification is, what? That some douche can't be bothered to stick his phone on a cradle for 90 seconds to sync up with his email client every couple days? Because he can't wait four minutes for his phone to poll an IMAP server? I agree. It is crazy.

4 minutes? What decade is this where you have to have "sync phone" as one of your task items? Computers should be allowed to do what they do best without my intervention.

You can have those features for free with Gmail even with your own domain for a maximum of 50 people.

The major hurdle is the protocol. If someone would design a standardized free add-on to IMAP (not my preference) or a directory syncing protocol then we wouldn't need to have this discussion. Once the protocol is written then the server side can be written and the mobile app can be written. Done and done.

 

[mubs]

Yes, but that probably means your Exchange server has some excessive mail processing and/or routing happening.

That's probably because it has to go from Exchange to BB's server and then to the mobile device, whereas it is one less hop from Exchange to Outlook.

 

[LunarMist]

That's probably because it has to go from Exchange to BB's server and then to the mobile device, whereas it is one less hop from Exchange to Outlook.

But the BB receives it first.