Tips for LARGE mail files

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

In our environment, we have several users who have very large mail files.

Servers: Range from 6.5.4FP3 - 6.5.6FP3

Clients: Range from 6.5.1 - 6.5.6

Attachment Limit: 50MG

Quota: mostly set at 1GB

Several users have outgrown the 1GB several times, so much so that we have removed their quotas because the volume of mail in which they receive is just too high and they receive/send lots of scanned contracts as attachments.

This leads us to several problems:

  1. We have several people who have mailboxes that are 5-12GB. Our biggest is at 30GB.

  2. Slow loading of mailbox. Building that Inbox view takes 10 minutes for some users.

  3. We are afraid to full text everyone’s mailbox because of the time the indexer takes to index their mail file, and the space it consumes on the server.

  4. Full Text indexes that we do create, often become corrupt.

  5. Running compact on the weekends via a program documents takes more than 24 hours (for the entire server).

  6. Sometimes the compact task does not work, so we must manually run a compact -c

  7. We have tried creating a local replica and replication schedule to let them work on the local replica, but users complain that they receive mail on their blackberry’s before they receive it in their inbox (because of the small replication delay). We try to set the replication at 15 minute intervals.

  8. Some users complain that accessing their local replica is just as slow as accessing the server copy.

  9. We try to create server based archives manually for the users. We are working on implementing operational archiving from AXS-One. (we currently have compliancy capturing in place from AXS-One). However, archiving is a major problem for us, as we are running out of disk space at an alarming rate because of the way that email is used. It’s used almost as a document store for various types of contracts.

We are using the OpenNTF1.7b mail template.

We get lots of complaints from users that their mail files are slow, the searching doesn’t work that well, it takes along time to open their mailboxes and it isn’t outlook.

What tips does the community have on improving performance of large mail files?

2

Subject: Tips for LARGE mail files

There’s no one solution. You need to attack this on multiple fronts.

Since you haven’t mentioned upgrading as a possibility, I’ll raise it. Both Domino 7 and 8 reduced disk i/o on the server substantially, and 8.5 will have a new feature called DAOS that dramatically reduces disk space used for attachments. It sounds to me like you this gives you substantial justification for considering an upgrade.

Also, Domino 8 has an Inbox Management feature that automatically removes old messages from the Inbox folder. Even if upgrading is not something you can do, implementing an agent to do this in Domino 7 or 6 is not hard.

The primary front you should attack is excessive email usage and retention patterns, and you’ve already identified an obvious suspect. Why are some users dependent on keeping scanned contracts in their mail files? Why don’t you have a contract library application built for them, with mail sending capabilities built in so that the giant docs don’t end up in user’s Sent folders? With a simple modification to the mail template – you’re already using a customized template, after all – you can give those users a one-click method to transfer received contracts into the library – optionally leaving the original message, but with attachments stripped, in the user’s mail file. And once you’ve got this application in place, look at other similar business processes that are building up lots of mail, and get applications in place to reduce the volume. The beauty of the Notes platform is that these applications aren’t going to be very expensive to build, and they’ll almost certainly help your users do their work more efficiently while making a big dent in your mail file size problem.

3

Subject: Remove documents from inbox

Teach your users to “Actions - Folder - Remove from folder” to remove documents from inbox, when they have read/acted upon a mail.Keeping the number of documents in Inbox as small as possible is crucial to performance.

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Subject: Tips for LARGE mail files

I think you should try compressing attached files. Take a look at ZipMail (www.zipmail.com). In this site there are other products like MKESL that prevents some users from sending large emails and implements local quota based on bandwidth and other stuff related to bandwidth and storage savings.

5

Subject: RE: Tips for LARGE mail files

Hi David,

Best practices for large Lotus Notes mail files

From Ed Brill’s blog Inbox management

JYR

6

Subject: RE: Tips for LARGE mail files

Thanks,

I had previously seen that, but wanted to get some advice from the field from my peers.

-David