Customising the 'You are over your quota' message in Exchange

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I am sure a number if you have seen this message before, well it’s now possible to customise the message to include more terse wording or perhaps the option to pay money into the IT administrators Paypal account to a bigger mailbox ;-).

First of all I would say that prevention is better than a cure. To stop you even receiving this message in the first place, have a good think about what you are using your inbox for. I believe there are three common reasons why people fill up their mailboxes

  1. People use email to have real-time conversations they could have over another medium
  2. People use their inbox as a file store
  3. People use email to transfer files to one another

If any of these sound familiar then you should take a look at a combination of Live Communication Server and Sharepoint.

Live Communication Server is great for transferring files between people and can take the pressure of Exchange and your mailbox by allowing people to have conversations without needing to fill up their sent items, deleted items and inbox folders. It has many other advantages but for the purpose of this post, those are the features I wanted to highlight.

Sharepoint on the other hand is extremely useful as a file store and again for transferring files. What Sharepoint gives me is the ability to host my own internal document share where I can post documents, spreadsheet, pictures or anything else for that matter on a website where both my colleagues and I can gain access to it. What this means for me now is that when someone ask for a copy of the presentation I did last week I no longer email it to them, instead I point them to my Sharepoint site where the file is stored.

I use both of these products everyday now and has allowed me to keep control of my mailbox and stay under the 200mb limit.

However, if you find that you or your 'users' can’t keep to the limit then there is now a tool to customise the quota message that get sent to them. Its available for download here and allows you to change the message without adding event sinks or changing the DLL file like you had to before. Its works for Exchange 2003 SP1 and above and Exchange 2000 after installing this hotfix.

Get downloading and get customising your quota message :-)