A number of the sickos, like Ed, Bill, and Paul, have joined in the discussion on Peter de Haas' entry concerning shared mail. I left the brunt of my point in the comments and just wanted to say a few things here. I just can't understand why any company, aside from an SMB trying to cut corners on IT or one with completely inexperienced IT management, would choose to run shared mail or single copy object store (SCOS). Although there may be some up-front cost savings as far as disk space and backup tapes are concerned, that money is easily lost the first time you have an entire office sitting around the hallway, chatting and joking about the stiffs in IT, while they wait for their mail server to be restored. Forgetting clustering, replication, and security, the fact that Domino CAN use separate files for each user's mail files is by far it's greatest advantage as far as mail is concerned.

I know that indexing is the biggest drain on any Domino server's performance and reducing a mail file's size by stubbing off attachments won't make those indexes any smaller or faster. In fact, I can't believe that there isn't some performance hit that users feel with they are in a SCOS scenario. Maybe MS' insistence on using SCOS is one of the reasons that they have not implemented their own Full-Text Search Engine for Exchange. I can't remember if cc:Mail had full text indexing, but I am pretty sure it didn't. I am sure that if Richard reads this he will set me straight. In any event, to put it bluntly, it's not the size of the file that matters, it's the number of emails that are in it.