Email as an Archive

Hi all,

Yet again studying is coming on rather slowly, although I have tested myself with the measureup product and am rather pleased with the result.

One thing I wanted to post about which I believe is a very valid point but not practiced in any other company I have worked for is using an email system for storage.

Now up until joining my current employer well over a year ago storing items in the email system just happened and I didn’t think about it much. Now though I have come round to my employers way of thinking that an email system should NOT be used as a storage facility. If you think about it it makes perfect sense especially for those of you using exchange and outlook.

Email was designed as a messaging facility and nothing more, think of all those personal folders tucked away with data that nobody can get to very easily, when those attachments should really be saved to either the users personal drive or better still the teams shared workspace.

Now the main reason why I think that email systems should not be used as storage doesn’t actually apply our current mailsystem (Groupwise). I’ve never ever had this issue with groupwise whereas when supporting exchange and outlook experienced this problem several times a day.

Ring Ring… Hello IT..ah you cant get into your personal folder this morning, hold on let me check……

Now this is a very typical issue with outlook where for some reason (and I still have not found an exact size that a pst has to be before it does this), the PST folder has turned its toes. I’ve seen this in PST’s of about 300-400 megs and some lucky people have managed to get the file to a couple of gigs before the file suddenly give up the ghost. Now if this issue doesn’t scream don’t use email as a file store I don’t know what does.

As I say the way that Groupwise archives emails is different and I’ve never EVER had a call about an archive issue in groupwise.