I Don't Know Which is Worse...

[Geek King]

Back story: Due to management interferance, we of IT were not alowed to go foreward with a hard limit on mailbox sizes for our email system. This has now lead to our overtaxed mail server filling up and killing the email service (0k free space on the drive). We are now working to fix things that should never have broken if we were allowed to limit how many Gigs of mail a single person could keep on the server.

Two annoyances, multiple times an hour, since email went down:

1) People thinking that because email is down, everything is down! People keep asking if printing and faxing are back up yet. They've never been down, people! Just email!

2) People thinking the "scan to email..." function of our do-everything copiers will work. I keep getting calls from people wondering why the stuff they just scanned (inevitably dozens of pages) is not showing up in their Outlook window.

Bonus: 99% of my calls today have been asking when the email will be back up. I find people getting oddly irked because I've been answering my phone, "IT Desk, this is Geek King. Email is still down, and I do not have an ETA for when it will be back up, as we are moving some large files* to a larger drive. How can I help you?"

*Two files were're moving currently sit at 100GB and 41GB. It takes a bit of time to back those up and move them to the new (larger) drive.

[Raveni]

Wow, that's some pretty stubborn management. Worst I ever had was convincing people that an upgrade was needed that needed a fair bit of new hardware and a lot of labor hours to convert the system and purge the old files (they would never remove, just deactivate old users)

With every monthly update, I would mention how many users we could add to the system until it was full. Finally, they blinked when they wanted to add 50 more, but the system only held 41.

How does someone email 100GB anyway?

[Geek King]

Wow, that's some pretty stubborn management.

[...]

How does someone email 100GB anyway?

I should have mentioned, but management nixed limiting the mailbox size because--surprise!--they were all well over the size limit.

the 100GB wasn't a single email, but the size of our whole mailbox file for the business. Sorry I wasn't more clear on that. The drive is small-ish because its an older server, and the budget for improvements don't come through unless there are serious issues. Preventive upgrades is a dirty term in the board budget meetings, apparently.

[crashhelmet]

Why don't they make a push for local pst files? Let the users archive their older emails they rarely access anymore. Something to lessen the burden on the server.

[csquared]

Why don't they make a push for local pst files? Let the users archive their older emails they rarely access anymore. Something to lessen the burden on the server.

That would mean that the users actually have to know what they are doing.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Bonus: 99% of my calls today have been asking when the email will be back up.

If only you could tell them that the email will be back up after everyone deletes their old email off of the server.

[Geek King]

If only you could tell them that the email will be back up after everyone deletes their old email off of the server.

Its actually too late for that once the drive fills up. The changes to the local copy of your mailbox can't propagate to the server because there's no longer any room to move files around, so we had to move things to a bigger drive to use the clean up program.

Fortunately, we've got things moving again now.

[Merriweather]

I should have mentioned, but management nixed limiting the mailbox size because--surprise!--they were all well over the size limit.

the 100GB wasn't a single email, but the size of our whole mailbox file for the business. Sorry I wasn't more clear on that. The drive is small-ish because its an older server, and the budget for improvements don't come through unless there are serious issues. Preventive upgrades is a dirty term in the board budget meetings, apparently.

Why is it so hard for people to grasp the concept of permanently deleting email not needed, and saving needed email into a proper file?

Not to mention, why do so many companies hire IT professionals, then proceed to override all their advice?

Never mind, just remembered where I am, sorry bout that

[Hanzoku]

It'd probably be worth your jobs, but... what if IT said 'I'm sorry, we only managed to recover the last 30 days of everyone's e-mail boxes. With a lot of work, we might be able to dig more out, but it'll take time.' It would cut a LOT of the built-up crap and slow down the ever-expanding e-mail boxes by a bit.