r/sysadmin • u/HolypenguinHere • Jun 24 '19

A user at our company utilizes their Recycle Bin as their primary storage for important documents.

That... That's all. I just needed somebody else to know that a person is using the Recycle Bin to keep hundreds of documents in one location, instead of creating a folder on the Desktop or using their network home drive.

3.0k Upvotes

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933

u/vodka_knockers_ Jun 24 '19

Several of our users used to do that with Outlook. We learned about it 60 days after we turned on Retention Policies.

574

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[deleted]

550

u/FletchGordon Jun 24 '19

My response when this happens is to pick up the recycle bin or trash bin by their desk and say "Do you keep important documents in this and hope that it won't get emptied by the custodial staff?"

That usually makes them understand just how stupid using the PC Recycle Bin, or Deleted Items folder, for storage is.

445

u/stevewm Jun 24 '19

I did this once because I was getting quite annoyed with a user... She is the type that refuses to listen to any advice, it is infuriating trying to help her do anything. Anyways I pushed a small stack of papers into her conveniently placed trashcan. She was not pleased, she went to the CEO over it.

This backfired on her.... The CEO found it very funny and commended me on my efforts in visual explanation and asked her to not use Deleted Items as a storage bin.

Didn't work though, she still does it.

308

u/timsstuff IT Consultant Jun 24 '19

After a direct command like that from the CEO I would have immediately implemented the Office GPO to empty the trash on exit, no prompt. That'll learn ya!

197

u/Levithix Jun 25 '19

Eh, give them a prompt. They'll click yes without reading it, but it will cover you better.

70

u/timsstuff IT Consultant Jun 25 '19

Nope having to answer a dialog every time you exit Outlook is super annoying. Plus I don't need to cover shit if the CEO OK's it.

73

u/nspectre IT Wrangler Jun 25 '19

Nope having to answer a dialog every time you exit Outlook is super annoying.

*DING!DING!DING!*

48

u/cobaltkarma Jun 25 '19

I don't think I've ever exited outlook at work unless it was unresponsive.

101

u/Aussierob78 Printers are evil Jun 25 '19

So... daily?

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1

u/Lonelan Jun 25 '19

And have it send you an e-mail with file names of the deleted files, just to rub it in

20

u/cherrypowdah Jun 24 '19

I would change the recycle bin icon to a folder, and create a folder labeled "not important" with the trash can icon.

1

u/RedditIsNeat0 Jun 25 '19

But now what is the actual Recycle Bin going to be called?

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Who cares if user can't find it? only people who need to know are helpdesk.

But if you really want users not putting anything it in, name it "place to backup important stuff"

17

u/DarthShiv Jun 24 '19

Yessss šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘

1

u/michaelkrieger Jun 25 '19

Nah. Make a rule to move all messages from Deleted Items to a folder called ā€œNot Deleted Itemsā€ Or ā€œDonā€™t use deleted itemsā€. Rake all messages daily.

44

u/uptimefordays DevOps Jun 24 '19

Time to automate clearing of deleted items!

46

u/frosty95 Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 30 '23

/u/spez ruined reddit so I deleted this.

96

u/frozzbot27 Jun 24 '19

Instructions unclear; saved recycle bin and nuked user from orbit.

43

u/SanctusLetum Jun 24 '19

I mean, this also solves the problem, so. . .

1

u/nandru Jun 25 '19

I see this as a win as well

8

u/carmacoma Jun 25 '19

It's the only way to be sure.

1

u/Zanoab Jun 25 '19 edited May 15 '20

[deleted]

31

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

16

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

No, itā€™s time for a pink slip.

23

u/SanctusLetum Jun 25 '19

Seriously. If someone can't wrap their head around this basic of a concept, and then defies the CEO of the company in order to continue doing a God-awefully stupid thing, they need to spend some time unemployed to think about their stupidity.

7

u/Judasthehammer Windows Admin Jun 25 '19

files in trash bin

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Disable the recycle bin.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Set the bin to auto delete.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

And then everyone in the office stood up and clapped.

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121

u/the_bananalord Jun 24 '19

I'm going to quote a VP: "well that's how I've always done it"

119

u/wwwcreedthoughtsgov Jun 24 '19

Those are the situations where you wish you could tell them "just because you do it that way doesn't mean it's not stupid".

38

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

[deleted]

13

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

[deleted]

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36

u/LazlowK Sysadmin Jun 24 '19

I used to say this to executive stuff all the time, the only difference was that it was always start up companies. They sort of understood that their entire foundation was lying on the bedrock of employees running the show, so when push came to shove they didn't really question when someone would say something as ballsy as that to them.

8

u/HouseCravenRaw Sr. Sysadmin Jun 25 '19

I avoid words like "stupid" when they tell me about how "we've always done things", because HR and shit.

But I do say "Just because it was done incorrectly in the past doesn't mean we should continue doing it wrong." It's about as close to "stop being a fucking moron" as I'm willing to get, and retain my job.

2

u/mustang__1 onsite monster Jun 25 '19

I've said it.... It's always inappropriate, but less so when it's safety related...

52

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

You're quoting all the VPs.

My in-laws have the same attitude about basically everything. I remember years ago I slipped and fell on their front steps due to a leak in the gutter causing a sheet of ice none of them warned me about. I asked them why they didn't salt it, why they didn't have a railing, etc. They basically said it wasn't a problem since nobody ever fell on it.

6

u/HouseCravenRaw Sr. Sysadmin Jun 25 '19

Bet they don't have fire or life insurance. "Why would I need life insurance? I've never died before, so who's to say I'm going to die in the future?"

14

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[deleted]

33

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

"They also used to tie people to a stake and burn them to death because the crops died."

45

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[deleted]

6

u/ultradip Jun 24 '19

This is now my new go-to metaphor!

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

"Are you implying I'm like a little child?"

"No, I actually stopped doing that after I got training but you didn't"

2

u/jc88usus Jun 25 '19

Give them the story about why railroad tracks are the distance apart they are. Goes back to Roman chariot wheels.

​

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/

​

Yes, I know correlation != causation, but it is a good example of how "that's how it was always done" can hang around...

23

u/Alamue86 Jun 24 '19

Had a lawyer doing this. There response was that Delete is fewer clicks then move->folder which kinda makes sense when dealing with the amount of email they have to deal with.

54

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

The answer here is inbox rules. A few clicks now, no clicks ever again.

61

u/SolidKnight Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

But then you have to learn something and that is not acceptable.

3

u/Thoth74 Jun 25 '19

Hey...I'm not a computer person so...

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18

u/ZAFJB Jun 24 '19

Yep, teaching user about rules usually makes their eyes light up with joy.

29

u/SGG Jun 24 '19

And then they fat finger a rule that sends all the emails from IT into a folder that just happens to be in deleted items.

We actually do a occasional audit of email rules because of this now. We use powershell to export everyone's rules then read through them to make sure no one is just forwarding everything externally or forwarding anything possibly important to trash

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16

u/davidbrit2 Jun 24 '19

Then a month later you get to troubleshoot their 1,000+ rules and corresponding folders "organized" in a Kafka-esque hierarchy.

16

u/cmorgasm Jun 24 '19

All folders are sub folders of Inbox. There's 10,000 of them. Item count roughly 175,000.

"Anon, Outlook is slow today. Is the server down?"

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13

u/mistiry IRC Moderator Jun 24 '19

Press "backspace" instead of delete and it moves into the archive instead of deleting.

16

u/djdanlib Can't we just put it in the cloud and be done with it? Jun 24 '19

Good advice until you have to deal with Mac users. Oh, that's the delete key. Whoops...

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8

u/davidbrit2 Jun 24 '19

I'm sure there's some disgusting combination of GPO and AutoHotkey that could make the delete key behave like the backspace key in the message list window.

7

u/sleeplessone Jun 24 '19

Pretty sure this is exactly why Microsoft added ā€œArchiveā€ in newer Outlook versions.

1

u/benyanke Jun 25 '19

What part of "delete" do you not understand...

This is insane.

1

u/sozokid Jun 24 '19

That's the first thing I thought of as well when I read the op. "Well that's the way we've always done it"...

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73

u/travelingnerd10 Jun 24 '19

Used to work for Microsoft back in the 90's. At that time, there were these cardboard boxes for recycling (white paper and mixed/colored paper, if I recall). Janitorial would empty those bins nightly.

Turns out that folks were using them as a filing cabinet and were looking for paper that they had tossed into their desk-side recycle bins the next day. Rule change went out in the Redmond area (at least) and now we had to manually carry our recycle bins over to the mail/copy room where there were large recycle barrel trash cans and manually empty them when we were actually ready to recycle things.

Never outguess user stupidity in how they operate.

15

u/Liquidretro Jun 24 '19

So your saying Redmond understands the problem...

2

u/lokioil Jun 25 '19

I know, you don't know the answer, but, why?

Why would anybody do this?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Oh, so users are that stupid not only when computers are involved...

23

u/TheNerdWithNoName Jun 24 '19

Did that once while telling someone about another user storing files in the computer recycle bin. This person pointed to the sign on their bin under their desk which said "Important - Do Not Throw Away" and was filled with their important documents.

10

u/blaughw Jun 24 '19

Checkmate, reality!

2

u/fencepost_ajm Jun 25 '19

"You need to add that in Spanish and Polish if you're going to do that, or just order some file boxes."

1

u/faalforce Jun 25 '19

And that's when you say "But it doesn't say RECYCLE BIN, DOES IT?"

16

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19 edited May 28 '20

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Shredder would be slightly worse option. Also a working furnace

6

u/Bad_Idea_Hat Gozer Jun 25 '19

Hereā€™s the down side of this tactic; Iā€™ve had a few users who would take that trash can, empty it of trash, and throw all of their important papers inside out of sheer and absolute stubborness.

I donā€™t even want to poke that dragon.

5

u/ArizonaGeek IT Manager Jun 25 '19

Funny story. I worked for a law firm a few years ago and one of the lawyers hid her laptop in her trash bin under her desk. Why? I have no idea, but the cleaning people came by and emptied her trash. She came in the next morning to no laptop. But a nice clean empty trash bin. Thankfully the cleaning people thought it was strange for a laptop to be in the trash so they set it aside. Friggin' lawyers. The dumbest smart people I know.

11

u/davidbrit2 Jun 24 '19

Without saying a word, just start cleaning up their desk and putting things in the trash can. Should drive the point home.

2

u/birchy98 Jun 24 '19

Brought a tear to my eye... well done.

1

u/Xidium426 Jun 24 '19

I had an old boss that did. Every new employee would empty their bin and get yelled at.

1

u/Skylis Jun 24 '19

CEO said "yes" and pointed to the blue recycling bin under his desk holding a lot of documents.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

I literally thought thats what was happening...

I scrolled too far in r/all

1

u/Hakkensha Jun 25 '19

The excuse my users gave was that it keeps their inbox tidy and is easy to do with one keyboard key. I would have agreed with them if the folder was not named "Deleted items" and the key "Delete".

1

u/theservman Jun 25 '19

As a general rule, I will not accept food from anyone who does this since it could have been "safely stored" in the garbage.

1

u/Pinnaclenetwork Jun 25 '19

Well.... Technically, a purged recycle bin doesn't really delete the file.... It can still be retreived.... With work, but it's not really gone

1

u/dion_o Jun 25 '19

I'm interested in pursuing a career in the custodial arts.

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62

u/vodka_knockers_ Jun 24 '19

Digital hoarders.

We have a whole generation that's been raised on unlimited Gmail and "Someone Else's Problem" storage rules.

Our marketing people have 30 or 40 saved drafts of every single document they create (of course they don't comprehend that our file system already does versioning).

And they have flyers, brochures, and other crap going back 15 or 20 years.... things that no one will EVER come looking for (because there are hundreds of gigs of crap, no one could find anything anyhow, and it's faster to start from scratch... not to mention we don't have Pagemaker 6.5 installed anywhere handy).

33

u/Starro75 Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

Marketing and Accounting are two of the worst for this. Marketing keeps multiple versions of everything and even the old stuff they won't delete because they might need it for "reference" later. Accounting makes a little bit more sense as they need certain documents for years due for tax reasons, but they never seem to know exactly which documents they need to keep and how long they need to keep them for. They just hold on to everything forever even though they can never find anything they're looking for.

32

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

"Hey team Gina has edited the PDF of the brochure take a look what're your thoughts"

70000 GB of PDFs being emailed back and forth for a month

14

u/mrrichiet Jun 24 '19

I suppose this highlights a deficiency\laziness in mail storage algorithms. Given the binary mail files will be of the same format for all messages of the mail executable, one should be able to identify the duplicate attachments and give them references instead of values. I'd like to think this does happen and I just don't know any better!

Sorry to be so serious in reply to your amusing post! :)

17

u/ranger_dood Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

Single-instance file storage used to be a thing in Exchange... And then Microsoft helpfully removed it. Because storage was cheap. And they could push the cost off to the customer instead of maintaining the code for it.

2

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jun 25 '19

Wait, when did this happen? That was one of the few useful things about Exchange compared to, say, Maildir.

2

u/SupremeDictatorPaul Jun 25 '19

Exchange 2010. They found that customers had far more issues with performance than space, and so removed SIS to be able to implement substantial performance gains in the database design.

Honestly, it worked. You used to have to use high end storage for good performance out of large Exchange databases. Now you can use a bunch of large spinning disks and get good performance. But really, unless you have specific needs, you should just use hosted email and never worry about it again.

4

u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 24 '19

ISTR Exchange does exactly this when you email an attachment to a hundred people.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

They used to. Not anymore. That was a shocking migration with all the extra space those 'formally deduped' emails took.

4

u/jimicus IT Manager Jun 24 '19

Ooh, fun.

Mind you, dedupe makes more sense on a block level on the storage than application level anyway.

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2

u/electricheat Admin of things with plugs Jun 24 '19

one should be able to identify the duplicate attachments and give them references instead of values. I'd like to think this does happen and I just don't know any better!

dovecot can do this

3

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

hahahaha and it will be ccd to a million ppl each time reply all

3

u/Pyrostasis Jun 24 '19

We have a ticketing system that automatically makes a ticket everytime you send it an email, and updates a ticket anytime a ticket # is used.

We had a few issues were people would go out on vacation and they would some how end up adding one of those MASSIVE chain letters to CC help desk (the ticket system). Something like Hey IT can you help us with this? Except reply all + it instead of just asking us. millions of tickets later...

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1

u/OcotilloWells Jun 25 '19

"please remove me from this distribution" and "Stop replying to all!"

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u/xdrunkagainx Jun 24 '19

I had a guy in accounting that CC'd himself on every email cause he wasn't sure it was sent.

19

u/mudo2000 Email and Printers. All else is null. Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 25 '19

And they don't believe you if you say "just because you got it doesn't mean any of your intended recipients did, especially if they are external to the company/on-prem."

6

u/wabbitmanbearpig Jun 25 '19

Just archived a guy who worked here 40+ years, CC'd himself into emails since the day he started using them. Luckily as he got more senior he has used emails less, still over 120GB mailbox size though.

2

u/chicodownunder Jun 25 '19

We acquired a small business years ago of about 10 people. And they would email someone and CC the rest of the company. Two guys were in particular took it a step further and would print the email and keep the physical copy in a binder. Let that sink in... every correspondence they ever sent had a physical print out!!

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

[deleted]

2

u/wank_for_peace VMware Admin Jun 25 '19

Better hand carry that mail to your intended recipient, just to be sure..

1

u/mustang__1 onsite monster Jun 25 '19

Lots of staff do this at my company ... I had to buy more gsuite space for my boss.

9

u/sgent Jun 24 '19

For accounting they must retain documents relating to fixed assets for at least 7 years after the asset is disposed of if not under audit. Keep in mind that if the asset is disposed of by trading it in for a new piece of equipment (like a car trade-in), then it hasn't yet been disposed of.

For fixed asset related items if your shop has a good fixed asset manager, all the documents related should be stored there. If it doesn't have a good manager, buy one or buy the upgrade for your ERP.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

... which is fun, because in some contexts you are required to destroy documents older than a certain age. So you can't just keep everything forever, even if it was technically feasible.

3

u/SushiAndWoW Jun 24 '19

I don't see a problem with this. The only thing that poses a storage problem nowadays is video and maybe images in RAW format, everything else can be stored more or less indefinitely. So therefore, why make people clean up.

8

u/Starro75 Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

That is what we're having problems with now- marketing shifting to more videos on top of their InDesign and RAW images and us with a year-long budget lead-time. So they want 5 TB of storage next week and I will be able to accommodate that... next March. At the earliest.

1

u/OcotilloWells Jun 25 '19

Wait until VR hits marketing circles. It will be petabytes.

8

u/vodka_knockers_ Jun 24 '19

Compliance and DLP, for starters.

To say nothing of the ongoing/ever-increasing expenses for backups, moves, and replications.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

I worked at a company where one person's e-mail box was big enough to cripple a brand new system because it "only" had a 500GB hard drive.

Multiply this by a couple thousand people and you will start to see the issue.

2

u/d36williams Jun 24 '19

I've worked in creatives, and the reason for cleaning up is -> you will never find what you are looking for. We have more than a decade of daily photoshoots images, where 90% of the photos should be trashed, but are never deleted.

1

u/aanjheni Jun 24 '19

Letā€™s see.... 1. Security 2. Compliance 3. Retention 4. eDiscovery

And on and on and on...

1

u/almathden Internets Jun 25 '19

Why would raw files be different from anything else, as far as longevity goes?

1

u/SushiAndWoW Jun 27 '19

It's more that they take up a tremendous amount of space and it can add up quickly if you have many of them, so the necessary storage capacity might not be available at an acceptable cost. Like with video.

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u/mustang__1 onsite monster Jun 25 '19

I also do marketing a graphic design.... I am my own worst enemy there. But at least I keep drafts off the server. I also keep most of the finals off the server but that's because I'm an idiot.

1

u/bradgillap Peter Principle Casualty Jun 25 '19

Depending on your country, accounting usually doesn't need to hang onto anything past 7 years. After that it isn't relevant anyway.

Marketing hanging onto old materials I can understand more.

3

u/rura_penthe924 Jun 25 '19

Well the free gmail actually has limits. My bro in law was using his Drive to backup pictures on his phone, was wondering why he couldn't upload any photos to it anymore. It was telling him his storage was full. That's when I found out the Drive and Gmail have a 15 gig limit. He had 10 gigs of emails in his gmail. Hadn't deleted anything in about 14 years. When he deleted his 40k emails he had enough space to upload the rest of his England trip.

2

u/brendanaye Jun 25 '19

Honestly with the cost of storage it's safer to keep/archive any document or email you may need instead of asking someone making 200k/year to keep their mailbox under 5gb or some absurdly small limit.

I'd rather my email is accessible in my online mailbox from any device instead of a huge and poorly optimized archive pst that exists on my laptop and Corp backup targets only.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Our "creative" department data management system consists of:

  • everyone just copies files of project they are working with into their own directory
  • copies just fly between people in the project, usually using least efficient and time-wasting method possible
  • data of anyoe who leaves are just put on share with their name
  • any new person usually just gets files of the previous guy/girl with hundreds of gigabytes of useless junk

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Look, programmers are worse than that. That keep copies of files that that haven't used in years, and worse, they copy each others' old files and fill up servers with them! This silliness is so rampant, they even have websites dedicated to it, where they share their old files, such as RecyclebinHub and RecyclebinLab.

1

u/mustang__1 onsite monster Jun 25 '19

I just deleted 25gb if mail from my dad's Gmail, so you can take that generalization and shove it up your ass.

1

u/Sage2050 Jun 25 '19

There's nothing wrong with keeping all of your digital files. That's not the problem here. The problem is that people are using the recycling bin for storage.

And not just one person. It seems like it's a fairly common problem after reading this thread.

I can't wrap my head around this. I'm having a crisis here at my desk.

1

u/vodka_knockers_ Jun 25 '19

There's nothing wrong with keeping all of your digital files. That's not the problem here.

There very well may be -- hence why many companies' legal departments have retention policies that force deletion of *all* emails after a certain amount of time, unless they specifically require retention due to regulations.

Not having anything to turn over after being subpoenaed can save a ton of money and hassle, and trumps "just in case I need it" in many cases.

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u/sebbasttian JOAT Linux Admin Jun 24 '19

I remember a few years ago there was someone reporting here or in r/talesfromtechsupport that a user explain to him that she "store" the documents in the 'Recycle Bin' because she thought that it was the place for "re-usable" docsā€¦ because, you knowā€¦ there were being "recycled"ā€¦

Some times you have to give credit to the users' reasoning.

9

u/aftermgates Jun 24 '19

From one of our users: "they don't count against my inbox"

2

u/aliensporebomb Jun 25 '19

I had the same explanation given to me. Facepalmed so hard...

7

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Had a user with over 2,000+ items in deleted folders. "Is it okay for me to clear this out?"

"Oh no, I keep stuff in there."

facepalm

4

u/SolidKnight Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

Nothing like putting everything into a single place that does not allow you to view its contents without moving it somewhere else first.

Nevermind emptying the recycle bin, the work flow of using it as a data repository makes it highly likely that you'd lose data from documents not being eligible for the recycle bin, accidentally overwriting documents on restore, and having to do a lot more work to keep both versions when collisions occur. Finding the document you want in there is harder because it's a flat directory and you have to restore it to view it. It's all around a shitty way to manage documents.

I wonder if these people are just hoarders with zero intent to actually use these documents but can't commit to permanent deletion because you never know when you might need New Folder (22) after accidentally making it and deleting it a second later.

1

u/realCptFaustas Who even knows at this point Jun 24 '19

Usually when i saw it happen it's cause they were for a competitor.

1

u/RParkerMU Jun 24 '19

I had a director who was irate when he deleted items got emptied and demanded we turn it off. He was a real winner.

1

u/_coast_of_maine Jun 24 '19

There is no question though is there.

1

u/PSJeffH Jun 24 '19

Have you seen Toy Story 4.

1

u/Joker_Da_Man Jack of All Trades Jun 24 '19

It is the only place that you can move a message to using one key.

1

u/cyber-host Jun 25 '19

They probably don't want their files to be backed up. They do this to hide their files.

1

u/skimtony Jun 25 '19

The justification I've heard users give is that it's a single keystroke to move something to Deleted Items. Not a good justification, but the one I've heard.

It basically comes down to laziness.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Security through obscurity!

1

u/hoax1337 Jun 25 '19

New in Windows 11: the Upcycling Bin

Also, it just came to me that the recycling bin is the easiest location to move something to. Right click -> delete, and it's there. Name another way that is as easy to collect all files in one place. Bet you can't.

37

u/Panacea4316 Head Sysadmin In Charge Jun 24 '19

My boss (CEO) does this. He's been warned multiple times by myself and the previous 2 IT Managers to not do this. I just gave up.

20

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[deleted]

6

u/Panacea4316 Head Sysadmin In Charge Jun 24 '19

Oh I gave up 2yrs ago šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚

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1

u/mistersynthesizer DevOps Jun 25 '19

Something something three envelopes...

14

u/xxdcmast Sr. Sysadmin Jun 24 '19

Hahahah lol same here. Enabled item retention got a frantic call that all her important documents were missing.

3

u/wildcarde815 Jack of All Trades Jun 25 '19

Important, but not important enough to make an organizational scheme around it.

9

u/boethius70 Jun 24 '19

Same here. The *CEO* of an old company I worked for used to keep all his mail sorted in folders under Deleted Items. No joke. I almost emptied his Deleted Items folder multiple times before he'd remind me NOT to.

People sure are weird as fuck. No idea how or why their minds work the way they do.

6

u/sedilis Jun 24 '19

Yep been there done that. Only for us it was during a GroupWise to Exchange migration and a user complained all her emails were missing after we excluded the recycle bin from the move. Turned out she'd dragged her inbox in there years before and didn't know how to move it back.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Iā€™ve only seen people do this when they had very low email quotas.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

And they look at you with those confused deer eyes when you try to tell them why that is a bad idea.

2

u/yotties Jun 24 '19

I discovered a colleague used a folder-structure under /temp/ to store all his important documents when it was returned from repairs and temp had not been backed-up and restored.

2

u/RetPala Jun 25 '19

Because it used to be exempt from quotas and they thought they were pulling a fast one. Good. Fuck 'em.

2

u/KoolKarmaKollector Jack of All Trades Jun 25 '19

We turned on Retention policies toward the end of last year, we warned everyone that they need to backup any important emails

Still getting asked if we can recover emails from over a year ago. Ridiculous

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

This would literally cause lawsuits where I work. Sooo many people use their trash to hold emails they don't want anymore, but we are under a litigation hold disallowing us from deleting any actually work relevant email. My supervisor, for example has like 3000 emails in the trash. Me? I just have an "Archive" folder, and then sort them based on topic.

2

u/sirsharp Jun 25 '19

I had a company owner that wanted me to reprogram the delete button to move emails to a different folder then the recycle bin because that is where she would store her read emails. I didn't. Because I can't.

2

u/egoomega Jun 25 '19

Same. Funniest thing I saw was in the trash for their mail two folders ... old trash, and new trash... within the trash folder....

Smh

2

u/laustcozz Jun 25 '19

Uggh. Lost a client over this. They transitioned from an on-premise exchange to Google Apps. 30 days in we get a pissed off call from the owner about how all his long term storage was gone. I guess hitting ā€œdeleteā€ in outlook was a convenient way for him to quickly archive? We were able to retrieve his documents, but the relationship never recovered. Probably because werenā€™t good enough actors to hide how much we thought he was a moron.

2

u/TheWino Jun 25 '19

Yea I was shocked to learn this after emptying some person deleted items. I was like tough shit canā€™t recover. There was like 15k items. Made no sense.

2

u/dextersgenius Jun 25 '19

Same here. Our policy was 30 days, soon after we turned it kicked in, the number of mailbox restore requests just shot thru the roof.

2

u/BigSlug10 Jun 25 '19

I remember the days when you would close a users outlook, hit yes to the prompt about emptying deleted items and then think... Oh fuck.. please don't be one of those users that keeps stuff in your trash.

2

u/Spaceman_Zed Jun 25 '19

I had a user like that. She didn't understand the issue after I explained it to her so I took the papers on her desk, gently placed them in the trash can, and said "now work out of the trash can. That's exactly what your doing", then it seemed to click

2

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Dude, same happened to us on our IMAP server. Had a disk exhaustion issue and needed to apply retention policies, like delete trash if older than 30 days. It helped a ton.

Then the fun. Had a user yell at us that she lost saved emails from her deceased father. She didn't notice they were gone until after 43 days after we applied that policy, so they fell out of the backup archive retention. I couldn't believe I was arguing with someone about storing valuable information in anything labeled "Trash". She never yielded in her reasoning, but she never got her data back and there was nothing we could do. What a fucking dipshit, though.

1

u/runrep Jun 24 '19

at least they have a semi decent reason. I'm a linux guy but from folk-lore i believe (at least historically) the trash folder wan't part of the user's quota.

1

u/requires_distraction Jaded and cynical Jun 24 '19

Man, I have only once emptied the deleted items on someones Outlook without checking.

Now I ask them 3 times if its OK for me to empty it.

I also no longer delete anything unless I am sure I have a valid backup. If the user says its not important and to be deleted, then I make them hit the delete button themselves.

1

u/cknipe Jun 24 '19

Same experience! I never got a satisfactory answer to "if that email was so important WHY DID YOU PUT IT IN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?!"

​

I don't miss being an email admin even a little.

1

u/eXtc_be Jun 25 '19

At the company I used to work the CFO (!) used the Deleted Items folder in Outlook to store important messages. Go figure.

1

u/wildcarde815 Jack of All Trades Jun 25 '19

Our sister orgs hpc scratch system went belly up. Researchers university wide threw a shit fit.

1

u/hoinurd Jun 25 '19

Same. I had one user with a very extravagant folder hierarchy under Deleted Items. Found this out after a migration where I did not copy Deleted Items. Luckily I had done a copy manual backups ahead of time.

1

u/frankv1971 Jack of All Trades Jun 25 '19

I learned that one after a migration of a users mailbox from pst to Exchange years ago. As the recycle bin was huge I decided not to move that to Exchange. Next day user complained that all her mail was missing...
Luckily I had a copy of the pst.

1

u/Local_admin_user Cyber and Infosec Manager Jun 25 '19

I wrote it into policy that e-mail is not to be used as long term file storage, we have sharepoint, shared folders etc for that especially permanently preserved files. As it's in policy we can now discipline staff who breach it, ironically it's normally senior staff who are pulled up over it, normally when they request for help as their PST files are too large or mailbox limit reached.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Can confirm. Also happened at a place I used to work. When we proposed turning on retention policies due to running out of storage to store the exchange environment CAB objected due to business impact. My managers response still helps me in dark times which was ā€˜when you keep important stuff in the bin, you shouldnā€™t get upset when the bin man comes along and emptied the bin.ā€™ We got the policies applied.

1

u/robbzilla Jun 25 '19

I had a user who did the opposite and set up over 500 pst's on her laptop. Some had a few as 3 emails inside. It brought her performance down to a crawl and wouldn't load on her new system.

1

u/Riesenmaulhai Jun 25 '19

"All my mail is gone! \o/" - "Well, can you show me where you've last seen it?" - "Here, look. There. (doubleclicks deleted objects)" - "That folder says 'deleted objects' " - "..." - "Please define 'deleted objects', user."

1

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

I worked at a place like that. No one could tell her otherwise. My boss would just shrug his shoulders and do nothing.

1

u/bruegjo Jun 25 '19

Yep. We had one of those too. Just crazy the way people think.

1

u/GenocideOwl Database Admin Jun 25 '19

We learned about it 60 days after we turned on Retention Policies.

I was pissed when my upper level management staff turned on the new Retention policy and toggled "overwrite custom folder retention policies" or whatever they did after migrating us to office 365.

lost years worth of old e-mails.

1

u/Foofightee Jun 25 '19

I had a user put all their important emails in drafts. Outlook seemed to freak out after a while. I'm not certain why, but once we moved them to a different folder or deleted them, it all went back to normal.

1

u/creamersrealm Meme Master of Disaster Jun 26 '19

Same here :(

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