NHSmail users have mailbox shrunk

NHS staff who use the health service’s email service NHSmail have been informed that after a recent move to Microsoft Exchange their mailbox size has been capped.

Some 80% of NHS accounts have been capped at just 200Mb, which appears miserly compared with the hefty 6Gb offered by Gmail for free, or the 5Gb offered for free on Windows Live Hotmail.

Quotas were imposed on the size of all NHSmail accounts at the end of 2007. CfH says the quotas have been automatically assigned “based on actual consumption”.

CfH says the quotas have been set at the following levels: 2% have been set at 1Gb, 3% at 500Mb, 80% at 200Mb and 15% at 50Mb.

Under the previous version of the NHS’s email system, based on a system called Mirapoint, there were no limits on mailbox size. The new quotas have been introduced as part of the migration to Microsoft Exchange.

Cable and Wireless, the company responsible for delivering NHSmail for the past three years, announced in July 2007 it would switch to Microsoft Exchange 2007. By the end of 2007 there were estimated to be 180,000 active users of NHSmail, out of an NHS workforce of over 1.1m.

In a statement to E-Health Insider, CfH said the quotas would allow the system to operate at maximum efficiency and “ensure that budget can be better spent on other areas”.

The agency took issue with comparisons to free commercial email services: “NHSmail is not a consumer service (such as Hotmail) and therefore must not be compared with them. Prior to the introduction of inbox restrictions, the NHSmail team conducted research into public and private sector email services and found that across comparable services, the average inbox restriction was 150Mb.”

Asked by EHI why the rationing of mailbox size had been introduced, CfH said that it believed predictability was more important than encouraging use of the service. “Quotas help in two ways. A known quantity of data to migrate to the new service helps facilitate a smoother migration process and quotas enable the new service to be designed in a reliable way without the need to guess consumption growth.”

Asked whether individual users would be able to appeal their allocated mailbox size, CfH said the quotas would be fixed for the time being: “As the new Exchange service beds in and its usage and performance characteristics are understood we will look to increase the quotas. Until then the quotas are fixed.”