Domino, Email, Spam and IT Related

This is a simple how to on how to manage lotus notes mail databases.
If you are a newbie on lotus notes administrator, I hope this simple how to will help you to manage all your users mail databases.

Set quota on each mail database

People said that harddisk is cheap now. Yes, harddisk is cheap, but still there are limit on that. That’s why we still need to set quota on each mail database.
I usually set quota’s based on my users levels in the company.
Example:

• For normal staff, I set the quota for 100 MB.
• For senior staff, I set the quota for 500 MB
• For Managerial levels, I set the quota for 1000 MB.
• For above managerial levels, there are no quota

If they already exceeded their quota, as default the new incoming emails still delivered to their emails, so don’t worry – no emails will be lost.

Archive old emails

So, we use set quota on all user mail database to prevent user mail database to grow uncontrollable and filling out our server harddisk space. But now the question is, if user mail database already reached the quota, then what they should do?

They can simply delete the old emails.

But, what if they still need some of the old emails?

Archive.

They can archive their emails, and then if needed they still able to access it.
Archiving simply moving your emails from the server to your local harddisk.
But, since lotus notes 6.x, now we can archive emails to local as default or we can archive emails to the servers.

Both choice have their own advantages.

For local, it will free more space in the server harddisk space, but then each user must maintain their archive database. If their database got corrupted, and they don’t made any backup, and all the archive will be lost.
For local, user have the responsible to maintain and backup their archive.

For server, all archive can be included in server backup or enterprise backup, so if anything bad happen, system administrator can simply restore the database, and the archive database can be accessed from any workstation. But this will not free more space in the server harddisk space.

But, because the first idea of archive to have more free space in the server harddisk space, in my opinion local archive is the best choice.

This simple two steps will help you to manage user mail databases, but the last thing, and the most important things is that you have to train the users. Give them knowledge on what is quota and what is archive, so there will be no dumb mistakes made by users.

For more reading, I found this best practise from developerworks very usefull.

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