Managing Server Based Email

I'm seeing more and more instances where email boxes are near, at or beyond quotas set in Microsoft Exchange. This is a serious problem because

1. Users quit sending and receiving email when their size limits are reached
   
2. Excessively large mailboxes cause a real performance issue for the Exchange server
   
3. It's just not a good practice to keep them there.
   

With MS Exchange mail servers, almost all users choose MS Outlook as their default mail client. With Outlook, users have a number of alternatives to keeping all their email in their server-side INBOX

1. God forbid – read the email, process it and delete the thing
   
2. Set archive limits to something reasonable – maybe no more than a week on the server before being archived to a folder on the local machine
   
3. Copy read emails to a personal folder on the local machine
   
4. Create a local .PST file on the local machine into which read emails are copied
   
5. Move them to a private folder somewhere on the local machine or on the network.
   

There are options – options that are often overlooked; but overlooking these options can create real problems for your email system and your network.