IT, Documentation, and Bookkeeping

Most email administrators will encounter the problem of the mail system growing faster than expected, often to the point of it running out of space. Management, will of course want to know why they have to buy yet more drive space because it feels like it was just yesterday that more was purchased. Running through these steps periodically will help you keep your system running lean and clean.

Step 0, GW2014+: In the GWAdmin console select the main User list from the left menu, then when you see the system list of users, click on the little gear symbol on the top right just next to the Help(?) icon. From the Available Columns, select "Current Mailbox Size (MB)" and drag it over to the left side. For full details, see Laura's Cool Solution.
There is also: The GroupWise Mailbox Report Generator that gives you a spreadsheet that includes the quota limits that you can then sort as well. You can also craft a URL link that will give you a csv file of all the user info including mailbox size as per this Cool Solution of mine.

Step 0, GW2012 and earlier: In ConsoleOne in GroupWise view, under 'View' menu option, make sure 'Details' is selected and then 'Edit Columns' to include 'Current Mailbox Size (MB)'. Unfortunately, this new column isn't sort-able and never will with the migration away from ConsoleOne in GroupWise 2014, so you will have to visually go down the list for the big ones. Note that these numbers aren't updated live and the GWChecks Audit to have been run to update the numbers.

Step 1: Make sure that you are regularly running maintenance, ideally if automated. There are a number of things that only get purged from the PostOffice with the different GWchecks that will just continue to collect if nothing is done. Sometimes just getting this in place makes enough of a difference that you have plenty of breathing room for the following steps.

Step 2: Find out who is has the most mail/biggest mail box. GWMBSize from Stefan Peters (who is happy to hear it is still being used). We start with a weekly GroupWise Maintenance job within your main POA (you may have already created it as per my automated maintenance);
- In ConsoleOne, right click on your POA, GroupWise tab pull down to 'Scheduled Events' (assuming you don't already have this in place, which I will often do if I've worked on your system)
- Create a new event with name "Weekly Contents check", Event Type of "Mailbox/Library Maintenance". Trigger on Weekday, Sunday, 5:00AM (some quiet time in weekend when backup is not running), ...
- Create a new action Named "Contents check", Action "Analyze/Fix Databases", selecting Contents, Collect statistics, Fix problems, and Update user disk space totals....
- Logging Tab I do set to Contents.log, Results to the most appropriate admin. Now you click OK twice to where you need to select your new job to make it active for this POA.
- If you have more POAs running, go into them and select the same job so you don't have to recreate it.
- Once this job has been run, save the log file from the resulting email.
- Run gwmbsize32.exe, pointing it to that log file and select GO. You may wish to check out the settings tab before hitting GO, though you can readily change settings and rerun it, noting that it does overwrite your previous runs.
- For easiest viewing, the resulting .mht file can be viewed with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Or you can use the .csv file for in-depth analysis with the tools of your choice, such as a spreadsheet. Look at which mailbox is the largest in size and/or most amount of messages in their inbox/outbox/wastebin, and target those users to assist them in making sure they are keeping a clean mailbox.

Step 3: Find out what are the largest messages in the system and check with the relevant users to see if they really need it. One instance I found a user with a 250MB message, when I showed him the message, he was happy to flush it as it was a set of files he had sent to his neighbour with the CD burner to burn it. You can either reference the original Cool Solution for GWAttachmentStats where you will find the tool itself as well, or use my words as I give to my clients:
Create a weekly GroupWise maintenance job within your main POA (you may have already created it as per my automated maintenance):
- Old style: In ConsoleOne, right-click on your POA, GroupWise tab pull down to 'Scheduled Events'. New Style: In GWAdmin, select the POA, 'Scheduled Events' (assuming you don't already have this built)
- Create a new event with name "Weekly stats for big attachments", Event Type of "Mailbox/Library Maintenance". Trigger on Weekday, Sunday, 11:00PM (i.e. after the rest of weekly maintenance is done), ...
- Create a new action Named "List Big Items", action of "Mailbox Statistics", Expires statistics of only "Items larger than" 20000KB, to include Received, Sent, and Calendar items....
- Logging Tab I do set to stats.log, Results to the most appropriate admin. Now you can OK twice to where you now need to select your new job to make it active for this POA.
- If you have more POAs running, go into them and select the same job, as you don't have to recreate it.
- Once this job has been run, save the log file from the resulting email.
- You may need to do a little cleanup on the file before the next step. With your favorite text manipulation tool, replace all commas, semicolons, quote, and double quote marks with a space. This is because users like putting those in subject lines, and they mess up the old tool.
- Run GWAttachmentStats.exe, pointing it to that log file, and get both results. If you have Excel installed and everything lines up, it will even import it all to a spread sheet for you. Note that this tool has a version dependency, either 32 Windows or XP as a maximum.
- Rename the detail file to a .csv extension, then open it in your preferred spreadsheet (LibreOffice Calc is what I use and will describe, Microsoft's Excel is very close)
- You will go into the Text Import process: from row 1, Separated by Tab (only), Set Text delimiter to nothing (i.e. highlight selection and delete it), OK
- Ctr-A to select all, Data, Sort, in Options tab select "Range contains Column labels", in Sort Criteria sort by Size (Descending), then by User Mailbox.
- or to just see how much each user has of large messages; Ctr-A to select all, Data, Subtotals, Group by User Mailbox, Calculate by Size(MB), Use function of Sum, OK. With all cells selected, Format, Row, Hide, (take instinctive gasp), look to the top left of sheet for a little Plus + sign and click on it to open the summaries.
- You now know the biggest messages to chase down and get the users using a search folder for big messages. Sort by User Mailbox to get an idea of who has a lot of big attachments to additionally focus your efforts.

Step 4: Make sure that other stuff hasn't landed in the volume containing your Post Office directory, or even within that directory. PO\Offiles is typically by far the largest subdirectory of the lot (usually >90%, >99% not uncommon), with \PO\ofmsg and \PO\ofuser being the other two of next notable size (> 20 times any of the other remaining directories). PO\gwdms is the wild card that can vary tremendously depending on if document libraries are being used.

Longer term planning: As a general rule, it is best to keep the Post Office to its own volume, at most with a GroupWise Domain. Try to leave unallocated space available to add to this volume should/when the need arises. Since legal needs of mail retention typically exceed what IT types think of as forever, a good mail archiving tool such as GWAVA's Retain, and others, and just purging the old stuff from the live system. There is plenty of justification information for a proper archival system among the White pages of Osternam Research.
You can limit the users' mailbox sizes with all the attendant hassles that come with it, or you can limit the max message size at several points.