Mailbox Size Management Strategy (MSMS)

For organizations that need to minimize expenditures on storage and reduce disaster recovery windows, implementing an effective MSMS will reduce server loads, shorten restore times, increase ROI on storage expenditures, and slow the consumption of new storage as it is made available.

A Mailbox Size Management Strategy is most obviously required when there is evidence of a potential crisis in mailbox capacity. When users hit disk quota limits, or a mail server runs out of disk space makes this evident. The cause of this is generally more and larger emails travelling and being stored on the network, resulting in delays experienced by users in sending/receiving emails and extended times taken in disaster recovery. The lack of a comprehensive Size Management Strategy can result in lost productivity for users, which can have a spiralling effect.

Other system management problems that the Strategy should address, include:

• the need to reduce server loadings, disk storage requirements, mailbox quotas, backbone bandwidth
• the effects on remote and travelling users
• use of PSTs
• backup and restore times of servers.

These factors and their management are discussed in the associated paper: Mailbox Size Management Strategy – a discussion.

A strategy for mailbox size management is therefore an adaptable solution that allows the administrator the ability to resolve the issues by first tackling their most pressing need, followed by other logical steps (solutions) to alleviate other problems caused by increased mail usage and mail size. Applications include:

• MaX Compression Enterprise
• Archive One