Most email users are pack rats: They keep as much mail and other items as you'll let them stuff into their Exchange Server mailbox. Because many large Exchange Server implementations allocate each mailbox 50MB by default—mailboxes that hold 1GB or more are not unknown—you can see how the private Information Store (IS) can easily grow to 60GB or larger. Such large databases have extremely long backup times and make getting the server back online quickly after hardware failures a difficult task. A large email repository also worries legal departments around the world because of the information that investigators might find in the messages. The best example of incriminating messages, of course, is the role of email in Microsoft's battle with the US Department of Justice.
You can exert control over the size of the private IS by imposing mailbox quotas. You can also control mailbox size by encouraging users to regularly clean up their mailboxes. Enterprise-style messaging systems have long incorporated tools to help administrators manage mailbox contents. For example, ALL-IN-1, Digital Equipment's office system that dominated email for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, had the Janitor, a background process that deleted any messages older than a set number of days. . . .
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Jay Miller May 07, 2003