Way too much E-mail

[Mercutio]

I'm dealing with a guy right now who keeps telling me Outlook is sluggish on his PC and, in fact, a lot of Outlook clients in his office aer sluggish.

So I look.

The guy has a 7.4GB Exchange Inbox.

Other people in the same office have 1.4, 2.5, 2.8GB and likewise complain of E-mail slowness.

HUGE inboxes (I have a gigantic IMAP spool myself, but I don't notice a performance problem with having it) are a problem for outlook, right? Granted that I don't normally support Outlook or Exchange, but last I looked doesn't Outlook top out at 2GB per mail spool?

These Inboxes aren't full of deleted items or Junk Mail, but they do keep sent items and inbox items in various folders going all the way back to when their Exchange Server came online in 2002, and they SWEAR up and down that they don't want to look in multiple folders or multiple accounts for mail, because THAT might damage workflow!


Anyway, has anyone got any suggestions for how I can clean their mail up without anyone on either side wanting to commit homicide?

 

[P5-133XL]

Archive! Another solution is to break up the single PST into multiple smaller ones which is just another form of archiving. Have them go though the Email and delete, delete, delete ...

 

[ddrueding]

I'm at a client dealing with the same problem right now. 6GB is the largest mailbox, and I'm targeting everyone over 1GB. PST is really the only way. If they don't want a second folder, you can have all the mail delivered to a single PST on their local machine. The downsides being that web access won't display their mail and that you'll need a backup mechanism so the data is protected. Having the PST on a network store kills performance big time.

Really, they need to have an archive mechanism set up so that old mail goes to the PST and new mail is still on exchange.

Or you can migrate them to Gmail; it can handle 7GB+ mailboxes without flinching.

 

[Stereodude]

Have them delete out all their attachments and save those into a folder on the C drive or network.

 

[Mercutio]

Or you can migrate them to Gmail; it can handle 7GB+ mailboxes without flinching.

Originally, I *did* migrate them to Gmail, set up IMAP and moved all their mail.
Except...

The worst offender in all this, the dude who pays the bills, bought a Motorola Q two weeks ago and managed to make it work with the wireless "push" E-mail/Contacts/Calendar on his Exchange Server.

Which worked for a week, until the Gmail transition. Gmail can't push. He won't buy Windows Mobile apps to make it push, so he's paying me $90 an hour to put his Email stuff basically back the way it was.

And bitching the whole time about how slow his Outlook is and how he can't possibly deal with E-mail that's in more than one place (like the phone and the computer?)

This is what happens when you try to help out a chickenshit outfit.

 

[Will Rickards]

what version of outlook?

What I do with the 2007 version of outlook is the following.
For previous versions I had to use the lookout plug-in to achieve the same.

I have an archive.pst which has all my e-mails from when I started working 7 years ago. It is about 3GB or so. I have auto archive set to archive stuff older than 2 weeks in this folder. Only the inbox and sent items.
I use the built-in search in outlook to find stuff. It searches that archive in seconds.
They instituted a policy that exchange profiles couldn't be more than 100MB.
The advantage of the pst is I can access that offline.
The disadvantage is that I can't access it via webmail. But I'm usually accessing webmail from my laptop with the pst anyway.

Now for everybody else in the group we have a public folder and shared stuff is filed there. I wouldn't be surprised if that was way more than 20GB. Since this is not indexed I can't search it easily. But it is organized. But navigating it seems to have quite a bit of lag.

 

[Fushigi]

We limit the profiles to 100MB and auto-delete 30+ day old items in the Deleted Items, In box, and Sent folders. We also cap attachments at 5-7MB (5 published but 7 allowed).

Besides using folders to organize, I also have PST files. I create one per year and use that as my archive destination.

For searching, I use Vista's integrated search since it will look in PSTs. Or Outlook's search if I can target it close enough to start with.

Oh, also use Cached Exchange Mode so the profile is replicated to the client. That speeds things considerably as Outlook isn't constantly hitting Exchange when looking things up.

 

[Mercutio]

I am having a sudden onset of bastard operator syndrome just now and entertaining fantasies of setting 100MB quotas on their inboxes.

I must say it's doing wonders for my mood.

 

[P5-133XL]

Also check out their Anti-Virus software. I've found that some (Kaspery specificly) drasticly slow down outlook with large PST's. As a test, Just turn it off and see how that effects outlook ...

 

[Mercutio]

I got them to archive Inbox E-mails more than 24 months old. That's a victory, right?

 

[ddrueding]

I got them to archive Inbox E-mails more than 24 months old. That's a victory, right?

Just talking to a guy here who I kept talking to about having 3GB+ in his mail store. When I finally got to his workstation, he had 2k in his inbox, 1GB in his sent, and 2.2GB in his deleted. That was the easiest fix of all time.

 

[Mercutio]

I got paid $500 once to delete duplicate records in a Foxpro database (40 seconds of typing a SQL command, basically). That was pretty funny to me.

 

[MaxBurn]

We have a 75MB cap on our mailbox at work, not a big deal at all as we have our workstations set to automatically archive anything older than a week to the users local PST file.

Around January February I offload archive anything over a year old out of my archive but that still leaves me with a PST file that's maybe a gig and a half. Actually I'm fine with that, I don't notice it is slow or causes problems. Searches take a bit and it annoys me that searches START with the OLDEST which seems backwards to me but even that isn't an issue here, talking for seconds for a search to complete, well under half a minute.

 

[MaxBurn]

I got paid $500 once to delete duplicate records in a Foxpro database (40 seconds of typing a SQL command, basically). That was pretty funny to me.

They didn't pay for time, they paid for you to know what to type. Good for you!

 

[Handruin]

We made use of the Legato email extender which now the company I work for owns. Maybe worth looking into? I've not physically installed or configured it.

 

[sechs]

The worst offender in all this, the dude who pays the bills, bought a Motorola Q two weeks ago and managed to make it work with the wireless "push" E-mail/Contacts/Calendar on his Exchange Server.

Which worked for a week, until the Gmail transition. Gmail can't push. He won't buy Windows Mobile apps to make it push, so he's paying me $90 an hour to put his Email stuff basically back the way it was.

Tell him to get an f'ing Blackberry like everyone else.

 

[Mercutio]

Doesn't BES rely on Exchange, too?
And for that matter, does Blackberry push the calendar and contacts?

 

[ddrueding]

BES does rely on Exchange. The trick is the push technology. If he's willing to push a friggin button whenever he wants to, there are a bunch of solutions.

 

[Stereodude]

And for that matter, does Blackberry push the calendar and contacts?

Yes, it does.