Mailbox Size Limits: Gotta Love Em!

I just emailed a project manager at a company I know, and the email bounced back -- telling me her mailbox no longer existed.

I was surprised -- and assumed it meant that the manager in question had left the company (they do have quite a high turnover at the moment)

Turns out, she'd exceeded her company's ONE GIGABYTE LIMIT on mailbox size, and emails were being rejected in the meantime.

Welcome to 2001 guys! Pity you got here four years too late, and Moore's Law has moved on since.

Here's the equation as far as I can tell:

1 GIG of hard drive space:
      $1.

Three hours of the manager's time cleaning up their hard drive space:
     $500.

Making it appear to customers as if your key staff have quit:

   priceless

'aaron' on Wed, 23 Nov 2005 12:20:32 GMT, sez:

Weeelllll....not quite. Close, but not quite.

I used to wonder (and rant) about the same thing, but living in an IT world you get to add up all the other costs of space.

*Bigger hard drives = hotter = more cooling (ok, this is debatable, incremental and possibly infintessimal, but for large corporations it's an issue)
*Cost to back up that hard drive to DLT or other backup media

*For mission critical gotta-have-raid-5-with-hotswap servers (like email) SCSI is the interface-du-jour. I won't attempt to make rationalizations, it just is. And it's beaucoup more expensive then it's IDEish bretheren. (pricewatch =>36 gig SCSI 320 ~ $145...and most corporations don't buy from pricewatch. They get it at 3x the price because it includes a 2 hour onsite SLA with complimentary coffee mug and ditty bag.)

However, the point remains that while drivespace may not be QUITE as cheap as toilet paper (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html) email limits are still a PITA. And your numbers are still very much in the ballpark... =^)

I'll quit being pedantic now.

'Farmer Jeb' on Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:32:23 GMT, sez:

It's the old story - the error message is much of the problem! It should say "Mailbox DOES exist but is stuffed to the gills. Pick up a phone!"...

... or one could take the approach that my fancy Pioneer HDD/DVD recorder takes and continually decrease the quality (hence size) of the recordings as it approaches full. When the mailbox hits 80% it only lets the subject lines through etc.

'mike' on Thu, 24 Nov 2005 17:31:59 GMT, sez:

I also wonder whether corporations aren't also subtly (ok, not so subtly) encouraging people to *get rid of mail*. I think we have a policy -- I probably have an old email on it -- that says we're not supposed to have any email older than 6 months. The more litigation-experienced companies would probably love to just automatically zap ALL old emails if they could ...

'too embarrassed to admit it...' on Thu, 24 Nov 2005 20:47:19 GMT, sez:

1 gigabyte - you think that's limited? My current employer allows 40 Mb - seriously! I have a free Gmail account with 2.5 Gb that I use 'unofficially' instead, but my company, who are paying for my time, can only manage 40 Mb...

'sg' on Thu, 24 Nov 2005 22:13:59 GMT, sez:

40mb: it must take you a lot of 5.25" floppy disks to carry home the backups each day

'Brian' on Tue, 06 Dec 2005 11:30:13 GMT, sez:

The problem on the last 2 jobs I've been on ( 1 State Government, 1 private ), is not the space issue but the legal risk involved in retaining excessive emails.I came in on the tail end of a court order for all of a particular state divisions' employees to scour their emails and documents for a 3 phrases and surrender them to the plaintiff attorneys. The state is now appealing that decision. Personally, I think 1 gigabyte is way too much. Look at the white collar cases Enron,Worldcom etc. Email presented as evidence was a big part of the state's cases. Big tobacco's, and even NASA's been burned by email. In fact, Dr. Phil is about to loose his credibility simply for not dumping his emails. The company Im currently at (Global Financial), allows 2mb of for your mail box ( you can save stuff locally though) but they run everything thorough a filter for sensitive words. We have an employee in the deparment here whose sole job it is to read most emails external and internal to insure that they comply with federal state and local laws. And say stupid things like:
"Bob ,
The $200 million in securites we sold to Mr. Jones and his company is a total and complete rip-off, plus I dont think it's totally legal (ha ha) he and the pension are gonna be screwed but hey the commisions are gonna help pay for the hookers we have lined up for the CEO's wifes party at the Playboy mansion and that Range Rover I've had my eye on, so dont say a word

P.S. I'll be donating the rest of my commisions to the IIUR (Iraqi Islamic United Resistance) a worth while charity that Ben ( I forget his last name) recommended. Regards, Bill"

Companies are very scared as they should be.

'Bryan' on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:58:38 GMT, sez:

Putting aside all the potential liabilities around email retention, disk space is NOT infinite.

So we should not be encouraging people to treat it as if it were infinite. Users DO need to understand that a limit exists somwhere, and have some rudimentary space-management skills to avoid hitting those limits. No matter what limit you set, eventually some users will hit it.

I agree heartily with the fellow who said the problem was a bad error message. I also agree with the folks who say disk space isn't as cheap as toilet paper. Maybe you can buy a gig for a dollar at the local CompUSA, but reliable, well backed up and managed disk space in a corp environment is far more expensive. You get what you pay for.

'leon' on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:47:39 GMT, sez:

hello precious commentors.

thanks for the excellent points, i retract a lot of my earlier sarcasm and sysAdmin-bashing.

These in particular are great points:

"No matter what limit you set, eventually some users will hit it."

"reliable, well backed up and managed disk space [..] is [..] expensive"

"legal risk involved in retaining excessive emails"

"the error message is much of the problem!"

I guess that what could be done at this company to help balance the cost (and risk) of too much email, with the cost of lost customers, is that people from the IT department with good "people skills" could give hands on training and help to people who need it, so that they can get their email account down and keep it there.

The human communication between IT departments and large corporations is something that could be improved easily -- it's a low hanging fruit.

Hmm, to get back to sysAdmin bashing: ever met a friendly one? Really? Bet they didn't stay in sysAdmin for long. ;-)

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