Ridiculous client, ridiculous 365 mailbox size.

[thecomputerguy]

Awhile back a client's mailbox was filling up the standard 50GB storage Business Standard gives you. Ok I bumped her up to E3 giving her 100GB's. She then in a short amount of time starting filling up that 100GB's. I logged into her computer and said hey, you have 30,000 emails in your deleted items! Can we empty that folder?

"No ThAt iS wHeRe I kEeP aLl Of My ImPoRtAnT eMaiLs!"

I didn't want to deal with her garbage at the time (non-MSP) so I just enabled Archiving and set a retention policy across the mailbox for anything older than 3-Years and made sure that the deleted items were excluded.

Here we are again today and she says hey I just want you to know my mailbox is filling up again.

I login and say Hey! You have 60,000 emails in your deleted items! Can we delete those?

"No ThAt iS wHeRe I kEeP aLl Of My ImPoRtAnT eMaiLs!"

I explain to her that is not good practice, you shouldn't be organizing emails like that!

"ThAt iS hOw I'vE aLwAys DoNe It!"

She has emails dating back to 2014. I told her OK well we may need to put a policy in place to perma delete emails beyond a reasonable date ... like maybe 5-Years?

"No ALL oF mY eMaiLs R ImPoRTANt!"

So, two questions ...

1.) How do I find out the total capacity of the online archive, because god knows that thing is probably filling up too, and how do I find out how much storage she is using in the online archive?

2.) What are my options here?

Change the retention policy down to archive after 1-Year?
Can I buy more of that expensive Office 365 storage from M$ and assign it to her mailbox?

She's killin me. She's stubborn and annoying.

@YeOldeStonecat
@callthatgirl

 

[brandonkick]

1.5TB seems to be the answer

Exchange Online limits - Service Descriptions

Find the Exchange Online limits for various service areas, including address book limits, mailbox storage limits, and reporting and message trace limits, to name just a few.

learn.microsoft.com

Business Standard Users get 30GB in the archive mailbox

Buz Premium, Enterprise E3/E5, Office 365 Enterprise E3/E5 all get 1.5TB

Exchange Online Plan 2 Get 1.5TB and Exchange Online Plan 1 get 1.5TB with the additional archiving license.


This is what I glean out of the linked microsoft support page.


Keeping 100GB of mail in "deleted" seems silly. How do you delinate what's really meant as important, and what was meant to actually be deleted.

Sounds like she can continue hording, with the proper license.... but she should at least adopt a better place of keeping them.



I love the old "but that's how I've always done it" argument.


We used to light our homes with oil lamps and everyone traveled in horse drawn wagons.... but we don't do THAT anymore? Do we? There was a time where I'd get up, go tend my cattle.... then in the evening tell the misses not to wait up for me, strap my gun on, get on my horse and head down to the saloon for some loud mouth soup. Pistols at noon for anyone disagreeing with me. Oh if only.... but again, we don't do THAT any more do we?

Another story my first software engineering manager told me, about the same concept was the "pot roast story".


A man and his wife are preparing sunday dinner. The wife pulls out a pot roast and cuts the ends off... wraps them and puts them in the fridge. The husband asks... you know... for 20 years I've been watching you cut the ends of, and I've never asked why? The wife thinks about it and says... well... it's what my mother always did. So that's why I do it. The husband asks... but why did your mother do it? She says... I don't know. Lets call her and ask. So they ring her mother and ask why she always cut the ends off the roast. Her reply: "Because the only pot I had wasn't big enough to hold the entire roast".

 

[thecomputerguy]

Ok so I'll start by enabling the auto-expanding archive ... I see no downfall to that and it appears the M$ will also grant her another 10GB of storage by doing that. So maybe the best plan of action is to enable the auto-expand, then change the retention policy down from 3-years to 2-years, or even 1-year?

 

[brandonkick]

Ok so I'll start by enabling the auto-expanding archive ... I see no downfall to that and it appears the M$ will also grant her another 10GB of storage by doing that. So maybe the best plan of action is to enable the auto-expand, then change the retention policy down from 3-years to 2-years, or even 1-year?

Yes. By enabling auto expanding archive, once the archive mailbox hits the "soft limit" it will auto provision more space up to 1.5TB (or whatever their licensing allows them... 30GB for Microsoft 365 standard... for example).

As I understand retention policies, it will shift all mail "older than" the defined time period into the archive space.

1 year is probably plenty, really.


One thing I am not familiar with is how you get access to mail in the archive area. Is it just nicely accessible in the outlook interface? Accessible only to admins? For a "EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT" client... seeing a large chunk of her "important mail in the deleted folder" mail disappear may set a fire under her.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Yes. By enabling auto expanding archive, once the archive mailbox hits the "soft limit" it will auto provision more space up to 1.5TB (or whatever their licensing allows them... 30GB for Microsoft 365 standard... for example).

As I understand retention policies, it will shift all mail "older than" the defined time period into the archive space.

1 year is probably plenty, really.


One thing I am not familiar with is how you get access to mail in the archive area. Is it just nicely accessible in the outlook interface? Accessible only to admins? For a "EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT" client... seeing a large chunk of her "important mail in the deleted folder" mail disappear may set a fire under her.

It appears below the users primary mailbox so you would have something like this.

john@contoso.com
- Inbox
- Drafts
- Outbox
- Sent Items
- Deleted Items

John Snow - Online Archive
- Inbox
- Drafts
- Outbox
- Sent Items
- Deleted Items

 

[thecomputerguy]

OK, got some info to get the Online Archive size ... First ... connect to Exchange online via powershell and run the following command

Get-MailboxStatistics john@contoso.com -Archive|Format-List DisplayName,TotalItemSize,ItemCount

The result is

DisplayName : In-Place Archive -John Snow
TotalItemSize : 61.02 GB (65,519,230,499 bytes)
ItemCount : 250312

I cross referenced this also by right clicking the online archive in Outlook, Properties, Folder Size

Both are identical

 

[DRPCNZ]

Tell her that Microsoft are going to delete any emails in the deleted items folder after 2 years so if she wants to keep them SHE will need to move them

 

[thecomputerguy]

If I change an old retention tag that is set to 3-years down to two years, will it just auto update and then start grabbing anything beyond 2-years and then just add it to the archive which now has 3+ year old mail in it ultimately ending up with 2+ year old mail in it?

 

[Porthos]

in your deleted items! Can we empty that folder?

"No ThAt iS wHeRe I kEeP aLl Of My ImPoRtAnT eMaiLs!"

I had someone who used to do that with the recycle bin.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Tell her that Microsoft are going to delete any emails in the deleted items folder after 2 years so if she wants to keep them SHE will need to move them

Can you provide me with documentation on this?

 

[thecomputerguy]

I had someone who used to do that with the recycle bin.

I truly wonder sometimes how some people remember to breathe.

 

[britechguy]

I truly wonder sometimes how some people remember to breathe.

And these are the kind of clients I try my darnedest to put in the rearview mirror as quickly as I can. You end up being the scapegoat when their lunacy comes back to bite them in the ass if you keep 'em.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Yeah well unfortunately a lot my clients, the ones with the money, are Boomer+

 

[callthatgirl]

Here is what I offer my clients:
You have 2 options
I move out those deleted items to a local PST file which cannot be viewed on phone
or
Buy a 2nd mailbox

At this point, I quit messing around with online archive. Clients complain it's slow and I can't disagree, chokes up my Outlook too.

It's their data, Outlook and Exchange has limits. I tell them that, I can't make magic happen with my unicorn wand lol.

 

[callthatgirl]

Btw....I help so many email hoarding clients, when they message me with "I'm out of space" I actually get excited, nice 2 hour job coming and ongoing maintenance for life.

 

[HCHTech]

She has emails dating back to 2014.

Has she been on O365 since 2014? I have a client like this, but they only switched to O365 in 2019 or so, and I wasn't exactly keen on uploading all of those already-existing offline archive PSTs to Microsoft. I can't wait until he retires next year.

 

[callthatgirl]

I have emails going back to 2000 from when I had my first corporate job.
The majority of my small business clients have emails back from the 2010 or before

I don't understand how you guys can be shocked that people have so much data, they will never get it rid of it lol. Make them pay more if you need to, but it's their data and imo....they should pay to keep it.

 

[Blues]

I couldn't get past the first customer response before I had to reply I was at a company that many of the executives kept "important" items in their deleted items folder and most of them had made sub folders so they had the tools and knowledge of how to use them. I simply would ask them if they keep important documents in their trash cans at home to help get my point across as to what they are doing wrong.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Wasn't online last night, left mid afternoon for a date night with my wife, went and saw a musical Christmas play at https://www.goodspeed.org/, dinner and a show!

So, ComputerGuy figured it out, online archives...I love 'em. While I'm always "Let a clients mailbox grow...who cares if it gets 30 or 40 or 50 or 75 gigs....but yeah once you approach a hunned, nowhere left to go after that. So...automatic online archiving.
It's wonderful, it shows up automatically in Outlook exactly like ComputerGuy noted in his reply above a few.....the online archive shows up like another mailbox, replicates custom folders and all! And, based on whatever policies you put in place, (email older than 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc etc)....the email server itself does the automatic moving of that email on the back end.

NOW....for "online archive only"...this saves space in Outlook. BUT....if you have a license that allows LOCAL offline archives, Outlook has to cache those in an OST, and that counts against the total Outlook OST capacity. (I'm fairly sure this is true).

Also, if you have a client whos OST got huge, and you go and do the online archive thing, don't forget to revisit the clients computer a couple of days later after the archive kicked in (it can take a day or three to kick in and shift email)...delete the local OST..and let it rebuild. Because OSTs will not auto shrink if you move email out of the clients primary mailbox. I'm also fairly sure this is still true.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I love the old "but that's how I've always done it" argument.


We used to light our homes with oil lamps and everyone traveled in horse drawn wagons.... but we don't do THAT anymore? Do we?

Our lamps got brighter! More and more lumens. Our vehicles got more horsepower, faster, larger, more distance.

Online storage is massive, and cheaper than ever.