Time to break out the wet noodle

Exchange Server has a 32k limit to message delivery rules. No, not 32k per rule but 32k for all rules combined. This has been an annoying fact of life for Exchange users for a number of years now. If you were lucky you could get 40-50 rules per mailbox and while that was normally less than you wanted, it was enough to get by in a pinch.

But now that Microsoft has gone all “worldly” with Outlook 2003 and switched everything to Unicode things have gone from bad to worse. The problem is that text in Unicode is somewhere near twice the size of the same text in ANSI. So with the latest and greatest Exchange and Outlook combination we can now fit even fewer rules (by almost 50%) than before.

Well, isn’t that just wonderful in that make-my-email-a-painful-haemoid kind of way?