Chapter 33. Creating Solutions to Limit Post Office Message Store Size

One of the biggest challenges of an administrator of an Integrated Collaboration Environment (ICE) such as GroupWise is retention management. Many people use their GroupWise mailbox intensively; some of them more or less live in GroupWise. These users want to save everythingevery email, every calendar appointment, in some case from as long as 10 years ago. And more and more mail is coming in, so here's the challenge: How are we going to store all of this on our GroupWise server?

The good news is that from a theoretical point, there is no practical limit to the size of a mailbox or a post office. In fact, Erno has been working these past few years with a caching mailbox that has grown to 9.5GB as of the writing of this book. Still GroupWise does not complain! Erno's laptop sometimes does, though, because of lack of disk space. Now take a look at your environment, count the number of users, and multiply that with, let's say, 10GB. An amazing number, isn't it?

You may want to consider techniques to limit the size of your post office; otherwise, the amount of data you have could become unwieldy and difficult to back up. This chapter explains how to enable mailbox size limits, how to limit the size of attachments, and how to save precious post office space by using third-party archiving solutions. One warning: Whenever you start using any of these techniques, make sure that what you're doing is legal. Some organizations might not be allowed to delete any item from GroupWise because of the rules and regulations that apply. For example, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley have specific ideas on what you can and can't do with your emails, so be sure to check which rules and regulations apply to your organization.