OGO Tech Tip: Exchange mailbox sizing
by. Robbie Wright
How many cookies can Cookie Monster eat? How many network administrators does it take to change a firewall rule? Unfortunately, what is the maximum size for an Exchange mailbox is just like the last two questions: loaded.
As most Exchange gurus will attest, it actually isn’t the size of the mailbox per se, it is the number of items in the mailbox. Even more specifically, the number of items in a folder within the mailbox. Think about your mailbox for a second as your desk. Now imagine that your desk has 50 pieces of paper on it. You know the piece of paper you are looking for and exactly where it is at: over there with 49 other pieces of paper. Now imagine your desk has 1000 pieces of paper on it and you need to find one. Stretch that out to 10,000 pieces. Even though you know exactly where it is on your desk, you still need to dig through 9,999 other pieces to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Folders in Exchange are much the same way. Imagine opening Outlook with 10,000 items in your inbox. Factors like WAN performance, disk latency, and a number of other factors come into play just when trying to look at your email. Critical or commonly used folders in Exchange (inbox, contacts, calendar) behave much better with smaller numbers of items. User created folders on the other hand aren’t used in the same manner as an inbox and naturally lend themselves to containing smaller numbers of items. For those of you who follow the inbox zero rule, you’re already on the way to having a better email experience as you will have a limited number of items in your mailbox already.
For OGO specifically, our default mailbox size for all clients is (currently) 10 gigs and we support up to 50 gig mailboxes every day. We always recommend to our customers to keep their mail in Exchange rather than archiving out to local PST’s and then reattaching them in Outlook. This ultimately makes the experience more complicated for the end user, creates a superfluous load on either the file servers providing the PST to Outlook or their local disk, and as the PST’s are no longer in Exchange, they are no longer being backed up automatically. Should an end user lose their local PC, their PST’s could go with it.
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