These days, if you want the big money (high 5 to low 6 figure$), you're a "Messaging Architect"... As an example: My company has ~3,000 mailboxes (users with e-mail), a couple of hundred 'resources' (conference rooms, projectors, automobiles?!, etc) that can be reserved through Outlook, and a couple of hundred groups (of people, e.g. Inside Sales, Big Shots). On any given day there are around 60,000+- mail items that are inbound/outbound to teh Intarnetz through the MX boxes. There are 3 physical servers hosting the Database Availability Groups (DAGs) - the database where mail is actually stored. Each one is in separate physical location and has the ability to host all 3 DAGs for failover/high availability/disaster recovery. There are two Hub Transport/CAS (Client Access Server) virtual servers. These handle mail coming from 'the edge' and route them according to rules that are set up (what domain are they going to, etc.). There are two Edge/TMG (Threat Management Gateway) servers that route mail to/from the HP-UX MX (Mail eXchanger) servers and to/from the HUB/CAS boxes. There are two HP-UX MX boxes that send/receive mail straight from teh intarwebz, well, actually from Postini, a Google product that filters out spam (or is supposed to, but I still get penis enlargement e-mails - I guess the ex Mrs. and all the ex-girlfriends are signing me up...). So. You have to take care of 8 servers, running either Windows Server 2008R2 or HP-UX 11.11. You're constantly monitoring mailboxes for quota size, adjusting for people that are on vacation, people that just can't keep their mailbox size in check, people that are *too important* to be bothered with cleaning mail. You are setting up resources as described above. You're making sure the DAGs don't run out of space. You're making sure that backups ran successfully. You're restoring a mailbox for some idiot who deleted "important" mail that he didn't mean to delete. You're restoring a lot of mail from 5 or 6 years back for the Legal Department as part of discovery for a lawsuit. You're doing lots of things, and this is only for 3,000~ users. I would guess that OSU, with 50,000~ students, plus however many faculty, plus I think they host mail for alumni, so they are probably well over 100,000 mailboxes. Plenty to keep someone occupied all day. E-Mail is/can be pretty complex.