Almost two years ago, I reported on a study sponsored by both IBM and Microsoft that found users who sort their email into folder might be wasting their time. According to the researchers, it takes less time to find items in your inbox using a global search that touches everything than it does for you to take the time to sort emails into folders by subject, sender, project, etc. As I mentioned back then, I have a split personality. At work, I still sort things into folders by topic or client. At home, everything just sits in the inbox, waiting to be searched. I haven’t changed much in the past two years, but I have found a couple of reasons while the “pile” scenario may not be the best idea I’ve had. More on that in a moment.

Whether you file or pile is first and foremost a personal choice. Type A personalities who love ISO 9000 probably create a folder for every conceivable category of mail, and spend significant time and effort making sure there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. That takes time and dedication, and is usually something I fall behind on and spend either Monday mornings, or time in the airplane, catching up. Since I have a large mailbox and run Outlook in cached mode, my sorting activities at 30K feet will sync up with my mailbox next time I am connected. Type B personalities don’t get bent when their Inbox shows 3800 unread items, and couldn’t care less whether something is in the Inbox, Sent Items, or somewhere else. It’s somewhere and Outlook search will find it, right?

So here’s where that theory can start to fall down. Exchange servers may be able to support really big mailboxes, but it’s not really the size that matters…it’s the item count. Each version of Exchange has had maximum recommended item counts per folder to ensure acceptable performance, and while each version has a significantly higher item count than the previous, it still has limits. The Exchange team has traditionally identified the following folders in a mailbox as critical: Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, and Sent Items. Whether an object is an email message, a meeting, or a calendar, it is an item in that folder and there are limits. Let’s take a look at what those are.

For those of you on 2003, obviously there’s yet another good reason for upgrading beside, you know, the whole end of life thing. For admins still on 2007 and trying to decide whether to go to 2010 or skip right ahead to 2013, a 10X increase in supported number of items is pretty big if your users are in the pile camp.

However, just because you can do something it doesn’t mean you should. There’s a few things to consider ever if your Exchange server can handle the I/O and your client can too. Like these.

Outlook Performance

The more items in a folder, the longer most operations within that folder will take. Whether that is a search, a sort, or adding a new display column, as you approach those limits you will start to see a performance hit.

Delegate’s access

If you have a delegate, or share a folder with a coworker or assistant, they too will see performance hits as the number of items in any folder climbs.

Mailbox moves

I have seen issues where a mailbox has grown to hold more than the recommended number of items, and still functioned acceptably, but when the admin attempted to move it to another database, the move failed.

Exchange performance

Even on modern Exchange versions with the newest hardware, too many items in any single mailbox’s critical folders can place a strain on server resources. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832791(EXCHG.140).aspx for more information on that, and note the strong recommendation to keep total items below 100K for any folder.

What to do

Ultimately, you probably want to start encouraging/training your users to perform at least some rudimentary sorting. Maybe if they created a folder to store everything three years old and older, that could cut down on the total items. Of course, you could create a retention policy and take care of that for them.

As part of the change request, you will probably need to answer the question of who will that impact. You can use the Exchange Management Shell to check item counts for Exchange 2007, 2010, and 2013 mailboxes. Build a script around something like this.

Get-Mailbox –resultsize unlimited | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Where {$_.ItemsInFolder -gt 5000} | Sort-Object -Property ItemsInFolder -Descending | fl Identity, ItemsInFolder

and adjust the value for ItemsInFolder as you see fit. If you still have 2003 in your environment, you can download a script from http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/42fc40d2-46a8-4e48-b15c-f0ad23357739 that can be executed against all versions of Exchange.

While piling may work okay for many, and in the long run save end users time, there is an upper limit for items in folders, and exceeding that limit will place undue stress on the Exchange server’s resources, reduce the performance of the clients, and could prevent admins from performing what would otherwise be routine maintenance. Talk to the hoarders and get at least a little organization in place, whether by user or retention policy, to avoid all of these issues.

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