This show is about using tech in the classroom. We call it Teacher In-Service On Demand. It can be found at www.techpodzone.com . PSUCast is at www.psucast.com . Let’s get together somehow. Nice listening to you.

Say you have a big sale that you want to conclude by month-end and the customer emails you a scanned PO? Or its 2AM in the morning and your CFO is trying to close the year and he/she just happened to fill up their inbox? Or a designer comes into work on Sunday and a customer emails them a large design file?

Do you really want to be the person that caused these people to not be able to do their jobs, because …. you think their first and primary concern should be to save disk space???

There are so many reasons for people to dislike their IT departments, do you really need to give them extra reasons?

I would love to see Doug go to my CFO that has 15G of email and explain to him that Doug thinks that he should get it down to 100M. I guess their are funnier ways to resign, but I cannot think of one now.

There is a reason that Yahoo raise their 2G limit to unlimited. People want and need it.

One more thought. I’m a CEO. At home I have a $20/year Yahoo account that allows me to store 2G. I have a business email system that I pay a lot for and my IT professional that manages it tells me it can only allow me to store 100M. What’s going to happen to the internal system and the professional that manages it?

The IT professional says well, I need a smaller database because of performance. CEO will think, why is this not a problem for Yahoo? Perhaps my IT professional is not very good.

Norm has a good point, but I would check out what you’re legally required to keep. I work for a financial services company and we only retain email for certain people, based on their job function (maybe our lawyers are wrong, but it’s not my job to worry about that). Every message they receive is archived to WORM drives before it is delivered to their exchange mailbox, so there’s no chance a user can delete a message that we’re legally required to retain. Everyone else’s email is backed up normally and we don’t retain it for any particular period of time.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

An entity (corporation certainly, and I assume schools) is legally responsible to keep all documents, including email for as long as is legally required.

You as the IT professionals are responsible to setup the systems, procedures and training to enforce these requirements.

The trouble is requirements vary all over the map. For example, do you know if some former employee is suing your school district right now? How long will their case run? What should be preserved? What is a financial document? There are dozen of categories.

If needed documents get deleted, you will be blamed. Saying you did not know is no defense any more than telling a cop you did not know the speed limit. At best you will be fired for incompetence, perhaps you will be sued yourself. This really does happen.
BTW, deletion includes overwriting old backup tapes.

The safest course is to keep everything for a long time (7 years or more) unless you are 100% sure that it is not needed (your example of a note from your wife about dinner)

Having your users archive email is a disaster waiting to happen. Now your users, not you, are deciding what is important and what not. Do you want to find that a critical email was archived to a local drive and then deleted when the user left? Do you really want the person that has been charged with harassment or financial misdeeds to be able to delete their emails?

Keeping the email on archive tapes is similarly a very bad idea as when you upgrade your email server to an new version the old data files are many times unreadable. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to recover old data from obsolete databases. It is so much simpler to keep data in one up to date, readily accessible database until it can truly be deleted.

Also I think your idea about what is reasonable storage is very limited. I worked in a company where C-level employees commonly had 5-15 Gb of email. We had 800 mailboxes on a 800 Gb database on an older server (2×800 MHz CPUs, 4G RAM) and it performed fine.

Rant off

Love your podcast

http://partissci.blogspot.com/2007/10/5-tips-on-keeping-your-e-mail-server.html

When you’re right click and select new , what actually happens is that an empty file (aka the “template”) is copied in the current location, so this is why Pagemaker doesn’t crash (because it doesn’t actually have to create a new file, it opens an “empty” file).

Best regards and keep up the great work.