Topic: Basic Email Set Up Question(s) from Nooob

[imcintyre]

I have looked around but cannot seem to find out what I need to know. If there is a book I can read or some other resource, please let me know and I won't post here.

We are a small company (30 people)  and have been running sme 6 file sharing server for a couple of years and like it alot. Our 120 gig hard drive is about 80-90% full. So it is time for a change/upgrade.

Our email is served outside but I am getting up the nerve to fire up the email on a server. I am doing some research first   .
I also have sme 7 server at home as file share and wiki but will probably do the same thing with email there.

1) Do the file server and email server need to be separate?

2) For the work server, we get a lot of CAD files that can be 5 Mg in size. I would estimate that we might easily get 10 files of this size every week. We then send them out to vendors or copy them to others internally. Then revisions start and there really is a ton of data flying around. All of which needs to be kept for reference. Oh yeah and everyone here has a 2 gig *pst file. How are disk drive sizes kept to a reasonable size?

Thx in advance for your help

[bpivk]

Answers:
1.) no they don't need to be seperate. You can only have one server and install contribs if you need something more.
2.)
How are disk drive sizes kept to a reasonable size?
I don't understand this question. How do you cut them in size? Rar or zip them (if this is your question). Or do you want to know how to limit user dir?

[imcintyre]

I make the assumption that if 30 people have 2 gig outlook.pst files and I have approx 100 Gig in file sharing that the disk space I need is 160 minimum. Oops I forgot their archived pst files.

This is doable but seems like a lot for a small company. If I scale up it gets unwieldy pretty quick.

There should be some possibility for consolidation but I see the large attachments as a difficulty. I thought to ask what other people are doing.

[bpivk]

Well i use webshare contrib or you can use some groupware programs that are mentioned on this forum.
Well if you have such problems with disk space you'll have to buy a larger disk. You would have to do this on every OS so this is not really an OS issue but rather a hardware issue.

[Elliott]

I make the assumption that if 30 people have 2 gig outlook.pst files and I have approx 100 Gig in file sharing that the disk space I need is 160 minimum. Oops I forgot their archived pst files.

I know this might be an unpopular view (especially among users) but setting quotas with reasonable limits will train your users pretty quickly to manage their email boxes.

I've got a 15-20 client SME email server and the basics include a 2G warning quota and a 2.5G cutoff. The users will figure out what to do when they hit the warning level or they'll ask me and I've got plenty of suggestions...

1) Local storage of email that is older than 12 months (this should be a function in their imap client)
2) Clean out their trash, junk, and sent folders on a regular basis too. Same rules should apply (i.e. deleted or archive anything older than xx months)
3) Store needed attachments on a network share, or a local folder that's part of the backup scheme

And of course you've got the option of a huge hard drive on the SME server but as you've said, it might not scale well if you're company booms - but that's always a good problem to have in this economy

-E

[bpivk]

I agree with you elliot. My quotas are set at the same level as yours. And this is better than buying a new disk (we have a 40gb disk on raid1).

They have their own computers for atachments and stuff.

[imcintyre]

Thx. That is some of what I am looking for, set up guidelines and the like.

Ian