My softball team got caught up in a "reply all" fest over the past week and we kept getting "system administrator" bouncebacks from this guy who worked at Goldman Sachs. We figured he gave Zog the wrong e-mail or something.
Nope... we went on vacation and his mailbox was full.
So, basically, Goldman Sachs limits the mailbox size of this guy who works in Risk Management to something like 75 or 100 MB, and decides that anything above that should get bounced back. GM used to limit my mailbox size as well.
Why? To save server space... i.e. money.
GM did the same thing on our file server. They'd send out notices to everyone to clean out their folders on the common drives to conserve space. For e-mail, they taught everyone how to "archive" by putting their old e-mails on their local drives. Archiving was long and slow.
Up until yesterday, it never occurred to me how UFR (Utterly Fucking Ridiculous) a practice this was. How is it possible that Google can offer 2+ gigs of storage and Goldman Sachs only gives its employees 100MB?
First off, let's estimate the costs of e-mail limits. Let's say that, in GM's case, everyone managing the pension fund spend just twenty minutes every two weeks cleaning out their inbox. If the average person there makes 75K, which is probably right given that it was a buyside, mostly Post-MBA shop, it works like this.
75k/52weeks/45 hours a week = $32.05 an hour.
$32.05 an hour x 26 weeks x .33 hours a week= $277.78 a person in time lost managing e-mail storage.
$277.78 x 150 people = $41,666 a year in wasted e-mail storage management time.
I think you can buy storage servers cheaper than this, no? :)
PLUS, what about the other costs?
Like, what if someone e-mails you with a major deal with lots of revenue for your firm and gets a bounceback because your mailbox is full? Is that what you really want to have happen?
What about important notifications that you miss?
How unprofessional will your firm look when it can't match its server capacity with its storage demands?
There are lots of technologies out there that de-dupe corporate mass e-mails, attachments, etc. and save lots of storage space, if its that much of an issue. But seriously, its 2005... I make spreadsheets that are 50MB. Let's stop playing e-mail storage tiddlywinks, suck it up, and buy another server. Your best people should spend ZERO time worrying about staying under 100MB.