Wednesday, May 30

"The message could not be delivered because the recipient's mailbox is full"

Oh, the problems of IT professionals everywhere. Nothing is their fault. It is always the fault of those inconsiderate fingers touching their equipment and sending emails with viruses or even the fault of some anonymous service provider. Now, I would think that storage is cheap. That is what everyone, including IT types keep telling me. That is, as long as your not using it to store email:
The message could not be delivered because the recipient's mailbox is full.
This is the most annoying message that I have been receiving lately.

Answering my email is truly frustrating already. The last thing I need to deal with is whether or not someone has received the message that I am sending to them. So I have taken the approach that the message has been dealt with, despite the annoying message telling me otherwise, and upon follow-up by the concerned party, complaining that they are still waiting for a reply from me, I can then resend the message. (Often the messages are sent to others, which in itself clogs up way too many email boxes.)

Now that I see what they are up to, I better understand why they are so eager to get my mailbox under 2 gigs. This is so that they can cap me as well. There is no way that I am going to let them do that now. Hopefully these caps prevent people from sending emails as well. I get too many as it is.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You do know a lot of this is out of our hands. The 2GB limit is a limitation of the exchange server itself. There are many other limitations such as the number of messages allow per mailbox, size limits per message, total mail store size (the accumulated size of all the mailboxes), etc, etc..

You can have terabytes of storage but if the software limits you to a certain size it doesn't matter how cheap or how much of it you have.

We make rules to keep your services running for everyone, not to make your life difficult. Get over yourself.

Whats more important you keeping 70 gigs of mail leaving 2g for the rest of the users on the system or keeping the whole system up and running?


The last thing I need to deal with is whether or not someone has received the message that I am sending to them. Thats fine you should worry about this all the time, email was never intended as a guaranteed service.

(Often the messages are sent to others, which in itself clogs up way too many email boxes.)
A proper server will only create one message per mailbox and link to the original.

Going on all the misunderstandings I'm going to assume you were just frustrated and venting. Hope some of the info I've provided helps calm the nerves...

Fred Fry said...

Thanks for your comments

"Whats more important you keeping 70 gigs of mail leaving 2g for the rest of the users on the system or keeping the whole system up and running?"
- Why not have more than one email server?

"(Often the messages are sent to others, which in itself clogs up way too many email boxes.)
A proper server will only create one message per mailbox and link to the original."
- Actually here I was referring to too many messages being sent to people who really don't need to see them. That just adds to the hassle of finding the important ones. Do I really need to received 100+ email/day. Looking at the content of many, no.

I had installed google desktop search for indexing all my email and the email pst archive files. I then copy the folder to my laptop and now I have all my email, from the last copy, with me when I am out of the office. That has solved much of my problems. (Although the index itself is now well over 1 gig.)

The company I work for has installed archiving software and now all my messages are truncated after a month. This causes a small problem in that I cannot re-index my email. (Not is I want the full content at least.) It would not be an issue as there is an archive search. Unfortunately, that does not yet work. So they are going to unarchive my mailbox and will archive it into a couple more pst files which I can then index and search myself.

Some jobs unfortunately now run fully on email. Basically all of my work is sadly the result of some sort of email. For that I do need the ability to have access to historical messages.