[petrocc]

Originally Posted by jason

I need to read up on this, thank you for your post. This archiving method is new to me.

I may be on the edge, but lets compare zimbra to outlook, which is probably the most used in production.... outlook has .pst functionality, so why wouldn't zimbra come up with something similar to crush the competition?

I don't understand why you want your users to move their email off a sturdy, monitored, backed up server and onto desktops which are less well made, usually un-monitored, and rarely backed up.

But let's step back from that. It's not ".pst functionality", it's "offlline mail storage", or "local mail files". It's not the Zimbra server or *Exchange* that would offer that, it's the Zimbra Desktop, Zimbra Web Client, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, or whatever client you choose to deploy.

One big problem is that web browsers--for security reasons--don't like to allow simple read-write access to local storage, unless you've opened the file from there. This could have changed in the 5 or 6 years (or more, IDK) since I last looked at the issue.

If you intend only to deploy the web client, then there is even MORE reason not to want end users to store files on their workstations as you're just going to have to field calls from end users who don't really understand the difference.

Just a thought, for those many thousands of outlook users that have to make the migrations.

The right thing to do is to migrate those PST files back up to the server.

We are not storage rich. I will look into REST, as an option, but if I did not size my system right now, what will I need 3 years from now, when my inboxes are full?

I know I could add more storage, but maybe I want to keep it at a cap, like we do, so I like the .pst option to archive locally into each users network folder (which is not the zimbra server), so they could have as many .zpsts as they want.

PST files are a royal PITA. I have to use Outlook in a different life, and PST files written by 2003 cannot be read (easily) by the version of outlook I have at home.

I can understand the urge to put quotas on people, but my suggestion would be to look at the storage usage of your existing users over time and base your quotas on the 75th percentile of the users, then establish a formal policy for requesting exceptions.

There are a lot of reasons you want to keep email within your mail server--things like users (or cleaning staff) copying emails off to give to competitors, retention and destruction policies, backups etc.

I would suggest that you can establish quotas and policies that will cover the vast majority of your users and for those few remaining use a standalone client.