Do a favor for your Exchange administrator

Neil posted today about lost time due to mailbox cleanup when users hit their e-mail quotas. There are tools that administrators can use to control the size of users' mailboxes, but in Outlook 2002/2003, users have a simple entrypoint to managing the size of their mailbox from within Outlook:

1. Select the Tools menu
2. Select "Mailbox Cleanup"

This dialog includes quick links to find large and old items, as well as other things such as guiding the user to empty the deleted items folder and turn on auto-archiving.

I was the tester for this feature in Outlook 2002, so if you have any problems with it, start up your time machine, go back 3 years and blame me. :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2004
  Neil makes a good point and I have seen this from both sides of the fence. As an operations manager at a finance company, we werenot allowed to hinder the users with things such as quotas. 'Storage is Cheap!' my IT director used to say. 'Users are sensible enough to manage their own content' he said. When we migrated from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 we had 100 users, 250 mailboxes and a 44gb IS. A year later when we were planning our W2003 early adoption, the IS had grown to about 70gb but still only 120 users.
  
  On my Microsoft v-dash mailbox on the other hand, I think i have a quota of 100mb and when you're sending powerpoint decks and word course manuals back and forth it soon builds up.
  
  I think quotas are a necessary evil but user education is the key :)
  
  Just my two pence worth
• Anonymous
  January 16, 2004
  Agreed on both points (with a slight modification - quotas are a necessary evil for everyone except me ;-).