I got another of these greetings in my LookOut inbox at work this morning. This happens a few times a month.
Gee, I wonder if my cow orkers’ habit of sending every hundred-word missive in the form of a 50KB Word attachment – or a 500KB PowerPoint slideshow with about six words of actual information per slide – has something to do with the problem. Or maybe it’s the absolute necessity of attaching at least one bit of inane clip art to every “social event” announcement. (Re the latter: Does LookOut have any sort of “conflicts with a subsequent engagement” filter?)
you forgot the multiple fowarded message about the missing child, the inspirational thought (complete with cutesy pics), the ‘replace my name with yours and cut and paste your answers and send it back to me and ten other people’ (which, in my system of about 150 people means that each person should get this piece of junk at least 20 times).
When I get that message, it usually is the result of one particular friend sending me 2 copies of an e-mail featuring 6 pictures of his kid. Thus taking me from 30 to 50 % capacity to 105 % in one fell swoop. Uh-oh, better clean out my mail box, it’s getting to be that time of year again.
Some members of Mr. Neville’s family are particularly bad offenders. They can’t send a simple message in plain text- oh no, it’s got to be in blue or purple type so it can fill up my email storage :mad:
Send your email messages in plain text, people! That way, people like me who would rather use Linux than Windows can see it, and it doesn’t fill up anyone’s mail quota.
What really drove me crazy at my last job is that everyone would e-mail huge files to each other…despite the fact that we were on a network, and could access the files ourselves, which were neatly sorted in folders labeled with the project number. Why not just an e-mail saying “such and such a file is ready for you to look at, and is saved in the project folder?” Why why why?
That was my question. I leave messages on the server so i can access them from other computers, but i also download them to my hard drive so i have a permanent email archive.
Also, how much (or, actually, how little) storage do you people have, if a few 50kb word documents, or even a few 500kb powerpoint files, can fill up your account?
My university account (which is my everyday correspondence account) gives me 100Mb of online storage, and my Gmail account has somewhere around 2.5Gb.
If my mailbox is full, why is there room for the email that tells me my mailbox is full? Especially when it happens on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
The friggin’ message should say “Your mailbox is almost, but not quite, full.”
That’s not the point. The point is that it’s annoying when plain text isn’t good enough for some people. Most people grow out of writing letters in colored ink or putting drawings in them sometime in high school- why do adults feel compelled to do these sorts of things in their email messages?
I appreciate that it’s “not the point,” and i agree with you about people who feel the need to turn email into some sort of 3rd grade art project.
I’m still surprised, though, that some people apparently have so little storage space that this causes them problems. There aren’t many things cheaper in the computer world nowdays than storage.
I teach, so you think my colleagues would have some common sense.
But anytime there’s an e-mail going around which says:
Danger! The worst ever e-mail virus will completely wipe your hard drive, set fire to your house and devastate the entire planet! Bill Gates says so!
these colleagues promptly e-mail it to every member of staff.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
When you send them the Snopes page which shows this is a 5 year old hoax, they either ignore you, or get huffy “How was I to know? I thought it was important!”
As with the PC/Mac thread, I think you’re forgetting just how many people don’t get to configure their own machines. In office environments, most people have their computer set up for them to connect to Exchange or similar, and don’t get to choose to simply run local copies. Nor is it particularly wise to do so in a corporate environment, given the enthusiasm some IT departments have for re-imaging dodgy machines (“oh, you had data that you wanted?”). And for that matter if you’re hot-desking, it’s completely and utterly impractical, since you have no idea if you’re going to be sat at the same computer twice in a week.
The reality is that lots of people need to and are required to deal with server-based email, and it’s really bastard annoying to have people treat it like a heavyweight file transfer protocol instead of a lightweight messaging one.
mhendo, while physical storage in and of itself is cheap, the cost of serving it to large organisations is not. So while we might grumble that we could buy ourselves an extra 100MB on the Exchange server with the change we drop down the sofa, actually providing that to an entire workforce is not all that cheap. If you get a reasonable volume of email, it’s very easy to hit your personal limit and it’s very annoying to find that your address has started bouncing because cousin Jeff got your work email somehow and decided to bless you with fifteen baby pictures straight off the 8MP camera he just bought.
My company generously supplies us with 50MB of storage. Trust me, one wanker sending a few attachments can easily put me over the top. I get around 200 e-mails per day, easily.
grumble…50 fricking MB…grumble
(yes, I DO archive my mail to the HD quite a bit, thanks)
My e-mail has a limit of something like 10 MB–and truthfully, I only get the “your mailbox is full” a couple times a year, I get the “your mailbox is ALMOST full” more frequently, but still not often enough to make me change my habits.
I should get an e-mail account without the expiration date that this one sort of comes with, but I’d hate to up my accounts I need to check regulary to 4. (2 of them are work and only work addresses, neither of which comes with much storage space).
But surely, for any company large enough to have “several thousand employees,” the cost of a reasonable amount of storage space would be extremely minor, compared to all the stuff such a large company could expect to spend money on.
Say you have 5,000 employees, and want to give each of them 500Mb (a whole half gigabyte) of email storage. That adds up to 2,500Gb or storage, or considerably less than 10x what i have installed in the desktop computer sitting next to me.
Even at full retail, storage goes for considerably less than $1 per Gb. Even if it was as expensive as $1/Gb, that would still be a total of $2,500. That’s petty cash for a company with 5,000 employees.
I still agree that people should learn how to use email appropriately. I also realize there my be other incidental expenses associated with providing this storage in the form of email server space. But i still contend that storage is cheap enough to make this whole problem a non-issue.
Sure, if the decision-makers care about making life more convenient for the people using e-mail. I’ll bet that at most companies, the people who have the biggest problems with their inboxes filling up are people who have no say whatsoever in how much storage space they are allowed. As with many areas of life, it’s getting the decision makers to understand the problem & how annoying it is that is the difficult thing.
I get this mental picture of little animated icons of letters with arms and legs bowing down in a salaam on your desktop while two treble voices chant “We’re not worthy!”
We are not allowed to archive items to our local hard drive. It’s company policy, and items in our In-Box are automatically deleted after 30 days, unless you move them to a folder.
Also, the Mailbox is Full warning will prevent you from sending e-mails, but you can still receive.
I get 100 MB for my personal (company) use and 200 MB for a shared one that sales uses to send me stuff. I can barely keep 2 months worth of info in the shared one without going over the limit, but since anything I reply to from the shared one goes out via my personal one with a “On Behalf of” on it, as long as I keep my personal company one below the limit I don’t care how big the shared one gets.
