That’s fine. You’ll never bring your computer to hook it up to my shop. No chance. See, you seem to think that because you know how to use a computer, everyone else does. And they don’t. So we in IT have to restrict these things. You have to use our system.
And you know what, it’s ours. Even if you download the email to your computer, it’s still our company email. It’s our company property. Don’t like it? Quit, but don’t think you’re deleting or taking that email with you. It’s ours. Sorry you don’t like that, but that’s the breaks when working for a corporation with an email system. Hell, with any IT resources.
Too much can happen to us with all the wonderful ideas you presented. We allow PST’s to be created. We give out 100 MB of mailbox space standard and will work with the user to increase it if necessary. I will not allow an auto-forward out of the company. I’ll cut that in a heartbeat. Too much risk. Bringing in your home computer to connect to our network? Not a chance. I won’t even allow a sales rep or a consultants laptop on our network directly, they’ve got a private VLAN separated. Sorry, we’re virus free and we’re going to stay that way. And no, I don’t trust you to know what you’re doing. I will help you work with the system we’ve assigned to you however.
You seem to think we’re doing this to be unfair or something. There are very specific reasons why we have these policies in place. I’ve got too many users that want to keep everything to allow it. Just can’t happen, we’d be out of space in days. And it’s not cheap to add it on.
I found a unique and creative way to deal with email taking up too much space.
It’s called delete.
I delete email I deem non-esential every few minutes; every time I check my email. If it happens that an email is of sufficient importance to retain, I move it to a folder of a specified category that said email fits in at least nominally. I periodically check these folders and delete emails that are no longer critical. If an email contains an attachment I need to retain, I save it to my hard drive or network drive and delete the email.
It’s really not difficult or time consuming to do this. You can blame other email users or system administrators for their perceived shortcomings, but a minimal amount of housekeeping is all it really takes to avoid this problem.
We used to get this sort of notification from the network support group at work. We eventually got fed up and started to reply with a promise to move it all to the promised electronic document management system as soon as IT had it up and running. We still don’t have an electronic document management system, but they no longer hassle us about mailbox limits. (We do a lot of critical work by e-mail and I have thousands of stored e-mails going back 7-8 years and regularly need to refer to them, and the organization still has no better solution for storing, filing and searching the info.)
They used to hassle us about the amount of data we had on the network servers, too, until I found and referenced the official IT policy document that identified network storage as the solution for the problem of backing up all our computer data and documents.
I suspect that the eventual retirement of all the senior IT dinosaurs who saw desktops and networks as passing fads that interfered with REAL computing on the mainframes finally allowed reasonable resources to be applied to upgrading servers and expanding storage to useful amounts.
Well, scribble me down as intuitive. I think maybe I was expressing a lot of dread about what the job search could be like were I to have to engage in one, in today’s world, after 8 years (3 jobs) in which I’ve supplied my own computer and been 99% unrestricted in how I use it.
Yeah, I just got cut loose. Fuck a proverbial duck.
Guess now we all get to see whether my principles will get in the way or bow down in the face of necessity etc…?
Well, I’m gainfully (FT perm) employed again, doing what I do (FileMaker). It is a bit mom&pop and I’ve got my misgivings, but I’ll take the job and keep an eye peeled in case I’ve signed on as crew to a leaky boat. But yes, I get to suppy my own computer and use Eudora, etc etc.
Here is one reason why the IT dept, and everyone up the chain of command is very interested in centralized management of corporate communication (from a Sarbanes Oxley article):
“Destroying or deleting e-mail messages which are considered business records, also can result in legal liability for companies, all the way up to the senior corporate executives”
As a matter of fact, one of my tasks this week was to send copies of our e-mail backup tapes for 7 different time periods out to a service to scan for keywords related to litigation we are involved in. That would be very difficult to do if the e-mail was stored on 500 different PC’s, some of which have died, others have been lost, etc. etc.
Umm, yeah, but I wasn’t asking why the IT Dept wanted email to exist in stored form at a central location. I was asking why they care if you download and store on your local hard disk that same data, especially in circumstances where the IT Dept was about to nuke the old stuff on the server.
Because if you have a company-wide regulation that everything gets deleted after five years or so, it can be mighty inconvenient to tell the Grand Jury ‘sorry, we have no emails from back then’ only for some chump to go “but I have my archive of emails from 1998”. Then they may decide you are telling porky pies, or tell you to go scan every hard disk the entire company has ever owned just in case - either of which are bad outcomes.
Plus which there’s that whole “I’ll copy it locally, then onto an external drive, then take that with me to my new employer” angle, and the data protection rules, and so on and so forth etc.
To the people who think that the solution is “more space”:
No, it’s not.
I once had a coworker who would be able to plug up everybody’s email. Accounts for our team had been alloted 4x the usual size (we were working in a special project that involved people from 40 countries, sometimes with pretty bad connections, so shared servers was not an acceptable solution); sometimes we’d get files with things like “the 4,000 production recipes for site ACSD” no problem.
But this guy once managed to fill my inbox, which had been at 5% the day before, with a single file.
Excel file.
Autofilter on (multiplies size by 3).
Several pivot charts, graphs, etc.
Of course, with colors and conditional formats.
And all he needed me to look at was two columns in three lines!
After Lotus Notes had spent half an hour downloading that monster and myself another explaining to this guy that If You Ever Send Me An Excel With Colors Again I’ll Dump The Latin Americans On You, Only CSV Is Acceptable, our other teammates applauded.
Just a quick point, exchange 2003 has basically unlimited amounts of storage (IIRC along the lines of 16 TBs), previous exchange programs did not. They had a hard cap of 17GBs, and this could only be achieved by editing the registry. I don’t know about where you are, but in my job we have plenty of customer we still have NT servers running exchange 5.5. You people seem to think storage is cheap (which it isn’t as demonstrated), people are responsible, trustworthy and intelligent and storage has ALWAYS been cheap. It isn’t, they aren’t and it hasn’t.
So they should standardize on a command-line email program that only lets you do file attachments by uuencoding them, breaking them up into 16 kilobyte chunks, and emailing each chunk as a separate email, then saving them, concatenating them, and uudecoding them on the other end.
That would intimidate most of the fuckwits who shouldn’t be sending file attachments anyway. (And think of all the “stationery” and HTML-formatted emails we wouldn’t have to see any more :))
I’d be satisfied with a policy that if you are sending a memo that contains test only, you simply put the text directly in the email rather than making a Word file and attaching that.
