Work Email restrictions

BattlingCheese

Hi guys and girls,

This is just a quick query regarding people's email limits imposed on them at work .

Reason I am asking is that in my current job we have an email policy and I am just wondering where we stand with regards our policy compared to other peoples experience's.


Employees: 350
MS Exchange 2003
Sending and recieving max limit of 10Mb
Mailbox limit of 150Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 300Mb.

Thanks

Khannie

Employees: 60 ish
MS Exchange 2003
Sending and recieving max limit of 100Mb
Mailbox limit of N/A per user with denial of sending mail at <never>.

I was asked to clean up my mailbox at 1GB. I did.

Are you out in citywest perchance?

Kali

It does seem slightly on the restrictive side from a users point of view, but from a sys admin position I'd say it's generous (the send/receive limit anyway).

Technically the 10MB limit makes more sense, you don't want employees sharing large files via email. It's counter-productive and leads to complete chaos... never mind the bandwidth issues in and out of the company itself, additional resources for A/V, spam pre & post-processing, storage etc etc.

The mailbox limit does seem strange though, as you're using 2003 the legacy 2GB limit shouldn't apply. The reason is most likely down to storage costs and backup issues.. the more storage you have the more costly (time/equipment) the backup plan will be.

The main problem will occur when users reach their limit, and are basically given the choice to:
a) archive - Which means the IT team are effectively relinqueshing control of the mail system (centralised storage) to the user's workstation.
b) delete - Which can cause major headaches at various management levels within the business. Especially financial and sales divisions where records need to be kept (and in some cases are legal requirements).

If you're concerned about it just put realistic requirements together (relating to a business and not personal use), and let the IT team know. Either they're inept or have no funding... if its the latter, a few strong words to a CEO about the consequences can easily sort the problem out.

Static M.e.

Kali summed it up for me

Employees: 1250 (Incl Volunteers)
MS Exchange 2007
Sending and recieving max limit of 10Mb
Mailbox limit of 750Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 1024Mb.

All our mail is stored on Mail Server, Mem is cheap these days so we beefed it up a little.

BattlingCheese

thanks guys,

Kali, our users are directed (via training videos, documentation etc) to archive to a network share which only they have access to and this is on a SAN

Kali

Kali, our users are directed (via training videos, documentation etc) to archive to a network share which only they have access to and this is on a SAN

Excellent... it's amazing the number of PSTs that find their way onto USB disks/DVDs etc. which obviously is not quite ideal for corporate security.

I actually forgot to mention what you asked for tho

Exchange 2003...
Users: 10000+
Mail size limit: 12MB (internal & external).
Mailbox warning: 150MB, hard-limit at 300MB.

ongarite

Exchange 2003
5000+ users
no limit on attachement sizes
100MB warning, unable to send at 125MB
I have 3 pst with over 1.5GB of data.

We have to archive emails reguarly and delete any unnecessary emails.

rymus

exchange 2003
roughly 50 users
15mb limit on attachments
no limit on mailbox sizes, although when we were migrating from exchange 5 a few users had to clear a couple of gigs out of their mailboxes.

trout

Mixture of Lotus Domino, Exchange, Host and generic POP3
12000 + Users (global)
5 Mb limit on attachments for Exchange users - 10 Mb limit for all others.
50 Mb hard limit on mailfiles - up to 200 Mb limit in "exceptional cases"
Once you go past 50 Mb, unable to send new mails.

Web-based mail is blocked (Gmail, Hotmail etc.) and USB attached storage is also restricted.
We can't order CD or DVD writers, and IT Security open a can of whoop-ass if they find burners, or even burner software on the workstations/laptops.

We have 2 Spam engines from different vendors and 2 AV engines from different vendors run against all inbound & outbound mail, and we also have a 'black list' of forbidden words.

Seems quite restrictive now that I look at the other posts

ongarite

Jesus man, where do you work? Give us a hint if you can't say

trout

ongarite wrote:

Jesus man, where do you work? Give us a hint if you can't say

think of the biggest financial organisation you know ... we're bigger

scojones

BattlingCheese wrote:

Employees: 350
MS Exchange 2003
Sending and recieving max limit of 10Mb
Mailbox limit of 150Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 300Mb.

Employees: 250
MS Exchange 2003
Sending and recieving max limit of 10Mb
Mailbox limit of 10Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 10Mb.

That's right, 10 megs.

Anti

Employees: 2000+
MS Exchange 2007
Sending and recieving max limit of 5Mb
Mailbox limit of 450Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 500Mb.

Byt we have unlimited archives of old emails.

JDxtra

Employees: 100
MS Exchange 2000
Sending and recieving max limit of 10Mb
Mailbox limit of 150Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 300Mb (if anybody asks, we just double these storage limits - not a problem).

Email archiving system in place to auto archive read emails to an archiving server 90 days after being read. No PST files locally on PCs or on network (denied by policy).

Khannie

scojones wrote:

Mailbox limit of 10Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 10Mb.

That's right, 10 megs.

WTF?

Stupid. Just stupid.

Anti

Thats what you get when you work for dell !

Archytas

trout wrote:

think of the biggest financial organisation you know ... we're bigger

Unless you work for the same company as me... who are bigger again...

I only deal with exchange though so cant comment on the others we use but 10 mb sending or recieving, mailbox limit of..... no limit. God I hate that policy, We have users with an average of 8Gb of mail... The top I saw the other day was 16GB?? And we even have an archiving system in place that archives off all mails after 3 months!!

BostonB

Interesting thread. Not my area but I think its along the following. We have 2000+ users. 2mb limit on incoming and outgoing mail. Everything bigger get caught and needs a formal request to be released and only if its work related. 50mb mailbox per user but after a certain time everything gets archived which the users can retrieve themselves. Most users aren't savvy enough to have PSTs but theres no limit on those. PST are a security issue though, so its not something that encouraged. Most people are encouraged to use webmail for personal mail, which is another security issue IMO. All mail is filtered though and it seems to be hugely resource intensive job to constantly juggle the filters and release email.

I worked for a while in another huge company, 2000+ users that had no email storage policy. Everything was stored in local PST's never backed up and it wouldn't be unusual to find senior managers with 10yrs or more of important email in unbackedup PST's. Perhaps as many as 50 different PST's and many GB's. We did a migration project once and it was nightmare, you had to track down all these PST's which were often duplicated many times on the users machines. Surprisingly enough only one user I was aware off lost his email. 8 yrs worth of email when his HD failed.

Beelzebub

Archytas wrote:

Unless you work for the same company as me... who are bigger again...

I only deal with exchange though so cant comment on the others we use but 10 mb sending or recieving, mailbox limit of..... no limit. God I hate that policy, We have users with an average of 8Gb of mail... The top I saw the other day was 16GB?? And we even have an archiving system in place that archives off all mails after 3 months!!

Gizza job!:D

youcancallmeal

Ours is pretty similar to everyone else's except we use Lotus Domino exclusively

Employees: 100
Lotus Domino
Sending max limit of 15Mb
Receiving no limit
Mailbox limit of 300Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 350Mb (Although the VIP's have no limit, I think one of them is up to 3GB at this stage)


Not sure if anyone has heard of but we also use MIMEsweeper to regulate incoming and outgoing mail. Basically if you want to send an email with an attachment it gets stopped regardless and then you have to request it to be released with appropriate business justification. Its kind of annoying to be dealing with requests throughout th day to release emails :rolleyes:

ntlbell

trout wrote:

and USB attached storage is also restricted.

I always seen this as the biggest waste of time ever, why do they do this?

trout

ntlbell wrote:

I always seen this as the biggest waste of time ever, why do they do this?

IT Security people get a nosebleed at the thoughts of users wandering out of the building with potentially sensitive data being carted about on USB keys or iPods etc. etc.

Imagine the impact on business if personal details of our customers ended up on a USB key which got left behind in a taxi or some other public place. I suppose it really depends on the business you are in, and how sensitive the data you have access to is. I'm sure if you are in the Finance or Banking areas, there are all kinds of rules and regulations about controlling and auditing access to customer data.

If you have a restrictive policy in place, and people by-pass it, at least the IT Security people can say "oooh ... breach of policy there" rather than say "we don't know who can access the organisations data, or bring it off the LAN ... cos we are numptys!" :rolleyes:

Archytas

trout wrote:

If you have a restrictive policy in place, and people by-pass it, at least the IT Security people can say "oooh ... breach of policy there" rather than say "we don't know who can access the organisations data, or bring it off the LAN ... cos we are numptys!" :rolleyes:

Ha ha ha ha ha hilarious!

Viruses... viruses... If nothing else its stops me having to run a virus scan on every PC that gets a virus alert after a USB key has been plugged into it.

zod

OP .. ask your admins to investigate exchange archiving products .. these can put mail into SQL and replicated file stores which are easier to admin than edbs (EAS by Zantaz or KVS )

Gets rid of mailbox size limits - brick level restores are also easy.

Amazed at the no. of companies using 2007 already .. SP1 is only out a month I think, so unless you guys have only just adopted .. you were using the RTM :eek:

Whats the CCR and LCR like to setup ?

onechewy

We only have @20 users at the minute, but we use Softalk IMAP WorkgroupMail and WorkgroupShare here. They're okay to use and there's a good amount of functionality plus it's pretty cheap - cost =<€600 for 25 user license.

Anyways, we don't accept mails bigger than 15MB, we quarantine all .avi .bmp .exe .jpeg or .wmv attachments so people have to come ask if they want something released. Same goes for profanities too. Basically no fun.

I Could never figure out the setting for putting a cap on sending size limits and spent about a week running around beating it into peoples heads that sending 65MB mails is not cool. We don't have a limit on peoples accounts as there's a public client folder system where everyone drags their mails into.

Workgroupmail has an internal archiving system which is great but the problem is the system is expanding into a much bigger system than we originally expected. With this setup there's always at least two copies of each mail stored. Workgroupmail is set up on Jet here, apparently if we had set it up on SQL originally, we wouldn't be having this size problem.

MiCr0

Employees: 70k +
MS Exchange 2003
Sending and recieving max limit of 10Mb
Mailbox limit of 45Mb per user with denial of sending mail at 50Mb.
(those aren't typo's)

almost all mail that any one ever receives is stored offline

Blazer

Employees: 5000+
Microsoft Outlook
Sending max limit of 15Mb
Receiving no limit
Mailbox limit of 120MB-Once passed user cannot send emails but can continue to receive emails.
PST folders are encouraged for this reason.