Did she just discover email???

[scorpy01.livejournal.com]

Customer calls to tell me her outlook express keeps timing out. So I check her account.
OMG!!!!!

213M

41,752 email messages

Did she just discover, after FIVE YEARS that she has email with her dialup account? No, it quit working right a while ago so she just stopped using it. Never asked us to fix it, never bothered telling anyone to quit emailing her.

Oh, and she wants all that mail so she can decide what to keep and what to throw away. Uh-huh. She's going to download it with a dialup connection.

Why isn't it Friday????

I want to go HOME.

Comments

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

We have people here who get that many megs of email in a month, although I'm the only one who gets that many emails in a month.

Is your pop3/imap/whatever server smart enough to delete what she has already gotten, when she gets disconnected?

[scorpy01.livejournal.com]

So far, she hasn't gotten anything. It just times out. I passed her over to our sys admin and he convinced her that it would be best to just blow it all away.

But to answer you, no. If she could get it to download say, a few thousand messages and then drop the connection, she'd have to start all over again. Our mail server sees it as one file.

[jecook]

Holy.

Fucking.

Christ.

Frankly, although the dialup accounts that [company] uses come with email addresses, we don't use them, as these are for a company provided machine. We have our own email server. Hence, they don't ever get checked.

I think the record we had for messages on the server was a few months after I my old boss died. I was assigned to temporarily get said mail, in case anyhting important arrived, and there was around 300 messages comprising some 10 MB in the month.

[jecook]

In hindsight, the record that I've seen was my boss at [ISP], who had some 500 MB of email in his mail directory stretching all the way back to 1997 and at least four name changes... ::snicker::

His boss was pretty cranky because we insisted on using PINE for our email reader instead of downloading it all to outlook on our machines... ::laughs::

[scorpy01.livejournal.com]

We're a small, local ISP. These aren't business people. They're just individuals who know less than nothing about computers, the internet or anything else technology related. We try to do a bit of teaching with our tech support but this customer wasn't in a "learning mode."

[110billion.livejournal.com]

212MB?
The record I'd seen was about 15 or 20MB, though that's because we "limit" their mailboxes at 10, though sometimes around 20.

Hello webmail!

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

One of our CIOs had a mailbox a couple of years back that regularly topped three gigs.

And that's not even in the running for record inbox sizes, from what I've heard.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Hell, no. We had to delay rolling out Exchange 2003 at a university I worked at because of the dozen or so academics who had mailboxes in excess of 2GB. The largest mailbox was 3.5GB and there were plenty more hovering around the 1GB mark. Since we were also moving to new hardware, you can imagine how long it would have taken to get those particular mailboxes across. Especially since we were going to use the migration as an excuse to implement quotas. But it became a big political bunfight because those particular academics believed that they had the right to unlimited storage, despite the fact we had no budget to pay for said storage, and the fact that their attitude reduced mail performance for everyone else in the organisation. Particularly when a few of those academics INSISTED on sending 100s of MB emails internally, when they all had access to shared network drives.

After I left, what ended up happening was that it got kicked around for a while by the Powers That Be until the Head of IT (new guy) got sick of it and ordered the Systems team to do the migration on Easter Weekend AND implement the quotas. He made his decision the Wednesday immediately before the hols. Imagine what joy the Helpdesk (who were not informed by said HoIT, since he bypassed the whole change control process) had that Easter weekend, when the academics who'd delayed the whole process by a year didn't get their email that weekend (being over quota). Imagine how delighted the Systems team were when he tried to pass the buck onto them for carrying out his orders (although they should have refused). Also imagine the joy of everyone when it got to the University Executive AND the newspapers as an example of "squashing academic freedom".

And they wonder why they had an 80% turnover of the Systems team that year, including me, obviously. Only the Unix guys stayed on.

[scorpy01.livejournal.com]

We don't limit because when the company started, we had only pop3. We do have webmail now but the webmail interface pulls the mail from the mail server to the server doing webmail. That's created a whole nother set of problems with some customers configuring to leave mail on server.... I don't even want to think about those issues right now.

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Good lord! That kind of defeats the purpose of webmail, IMO.

[scorpy01.livejournal.com]

Our sys admin talked her into letting him blow it all away. :)

He asked her if she wanted to tie up her phone line for the next several days while it downloaded.

I also discovered, while talking to her, that it stopped working around the same time someone told her she had a trojan but her Norton had expired and she never got around to renewing it. UGH! She's bringing the machine in for us to get it cleaned up. This will be fun.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

Well, just burn it to disk and send it to her.

[scorpy01.livejournal.com]

We thought of that but then we'd have to tell her what to do with the disk once she got it home. Do you have any idea how much we didn't want to do that? We tried to get her to download E-ResQ (before we realized how much mail there was) and that took over 45 minutes. She couldn't see the download button. She thought the Snapfiles site would put spyware on her machine. She couldn't get her mouse to click. It just went on and on. Then we find out she has over 200M of mail AND that she knows she has a trojan on her machine.

And her son was instructing her in the background and she wasn't sure if she should listen to me or him.

Fun fun fun.

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

I remember days like those on dialup support.

Against company policy, I would've recommended something like www.mail2web.com if the company does not have its own webmail service. Maybe still a pain, but a bit less time consuming to delete it a page at a time without having to actually download the obviously-junk and obviously enormous messages from the server.

[kerberos.livejournal.com]

We've had clients like that. they got to play with our webmailserver.

Our current record for biggest mailbox was 1.9 Gb for a regular popbox.

Safe to say our client could not even on their superduper fiber hookup from us download those mail.

[lions-tambua.livejournal.com]

1) it IS friday (actually 2 more hours to work)
2) 213mb ... that would be about 3 minutes download for me

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Heh, I must admit I'm not impressed either. I probably get that much in e-mail every day.

My Gmail account says:

You are currently using 188 MB (7%) of your 2663 MB.

1GB just doesn't seem that much anymore...

[mmm-brains.livejournal.com]

i've seen people who have more than one pst holding up to 1.5 gb a piece. I work in a hospital, they insist they need them all too. At least they aren't keeping them on the server though...