3 Exchange Mailboxes with 50GB and growing. Searching/Indexing is slow. Options?

Solution 1:

I agree with Hopeless, and will offer up my opinion on this.

1. Consider at least moving those 3 into their own mailbox database in Exchange.
2. Offer up training and knowledge on how to properly use EMAIL. That's a ton of email in 6 months time, which means they are either the most popular people in the world, or they are exchanging file attachments and storing everything in Exchange/Outlook, which contrary to most users beliefs isn't a file server/store.
3. Offer up alternative ways to store/send/receive those large attachments. Maybe there's a better way like a secure online storage or secure FTP site. Email the links instead of the large attachments.
4. Be more aggressive with the archive schedule. Set it to archive after 3 months instead of 6. Explain the benefits.
5. Help them manage their mailbox "look/feel" better. If they are constantly searching email then maybe they aren't categorizing/creating folders/arranging their email properly to quickly and effectively find things. Maybe they should be creating subfolders and auto-rules, etc. that would allow them to only search those subfolders vs. the entire mailbox.

A "possibility" could be to broker an Office 365 deal for them and do a hybrid deployment where these 3 crazy power users are on O365. This would give them each 50GB mailboxes along with unlimited archiving. Just an option that you might look into.

In the end, there's only so much you can do with current technology. Work to explain the pros/cons of their current solution, what options are out there, and where you want to steer them based on your expertise. A good explanation may prove to them that they can't have the world without some issues along the way.

Solution 2:

Your customer's going to be disappointed. If they're hellbent/deadset on having ridiculously large mailboxes, and searching them through the Outlook client, their performance is going to suck, and that's the bottom line.

It doesn't matter if you switch them over to a different platform or technology - searching through 50 billion bytes of text is going to be slow when they're running the search from their workstations through a client application (Outlook). The proper solution for how to do this type of search quickly is known as a database. The whole reason searching the MailStore is quicker is that it is a database. The OST or PST files are not a database.

Outlook is an email client, not a database. That's why it performs like an email client, and not a database. Unfortunately, there isn't a "solution" to that fundamental difference. They're going to have to search through the mailstore, or live with slow searches (or not keep so much mail).