E-Mail Limits - Best Practice

From: sid (justsid_at_i-dont.net)
Date: 08/09/04 

Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 12:00:08 -0500

I am up against the wall as far as our e-mail capacity is concerned. I can
always buy more disk space, but I can't buy more hours in the day. Our
backups are taking forever, our restores frequently fail, and if we ever go
down, we're going down hard.

I have 200 users and have set a default mailbox limit of 100MB.

We have about 10 executives for whom that is not enough, and I have
repeatedly had to increase their limits. All 10 are now over 500 MB, 4 are
over 1 GB, and one is at 2.3 GB.

Most of the problem is attachments, of course. Almost every e-mail contains
one or more spreadsheets or proposal with embedded .jpgs.

I have explained to them repeatedly why this is not a good idea, and I have
begged them to save the attachments somewhere besides their inbox. Their
reply is that most of the time, the attachements arrive with some
introduction or preface or explanation in the body of the e-mail. When they
"Save As," they lose that contextual reference.

For instance, the body of the e-mail might read: "Dear Jim, here are the
spreadsheets you asked for. Please note that I recalculated the fixed
assets total in the second work***. Let me know if they are okay."

Well, when Jim "Saves As," he loses all that information. If he later goes
back to that e-mail, it contains no reference to the filenames. If he later
goes to the files, he loses the memo about the fixed assets.

Questions:

1. I am using Exchange 5.5. We will be upgrading to 2003 before the end of
the year. Does 2003 offer any feature that has a reference to the filename
of attachments _after_ the attachments have been saved off the mail store?

2. Does Exchange 5.5 have such a feature that I am ignorant of?

3. It occurs to me that one option may be to buy a separate server for the
executives, but I have no idea how or if that would work and don't even know
where to start . Would I look up keywords "connectors" or "enterprise" or
"two servers one domain"?

Thanks