The survey reflects IT departments continued battle with growth of e-mail within organisations.
Seven out of 10 respondents imposed mailbox size limitations, according to a survey conducted by vendor StorageTek of 56 mid to large Australian organisations.
Joan Tunstall, marketing manager Australia/New Zealand at StorageTek, said by limiting mailbox sizes the IT departments were passing the pain of storage on to the users.
Tunstall also warned that this could create the problem of users moving e-mail from the server to their notebook, making it more difficult for the company to have centralised control of the information.
However, Tunstall said that finding alternatives to imposing mailbox limits wasn't a strategy which would necessarily be driven by IT departments. -They need to recognise that e-mail is a critical business resource that needs to be managed more effectively than today," she said.
The survey found that user's self-administration tactics varied from deleting the message and hoping they wouldn't need it later, to deleting their oldest messages. Philip Belcher, StorageTek's Australia/New Zealand managing director estimated that forced self-administration contributed to either loss of data or put this information beyond the reach of centralised backup.
Nearly 70 percent of storage or e-mail administrators surveyed also admitted that they couldn't restore e-mails from a backup themselves, the survey found.
Thanks to Philip Belcher and Joan Tunstall for their unbiased comments..... Say what does Storage Tek sell...... Perhaps we could ask Bill Gates about any issues with Windows....