3 ms·

Don't forget emails.. I have everything I ever sent or received, and I have it backed up. I expect 90% of my inbox is the jpg signature logo they attach to the

by boznz 2y ago

Don't forget emails.. I have everything I ever sent or received, and I have it backed up. I expect 90% of my inbox is the jpg signature logo they attach to the bottom of my clients email rather than hyperlink.

hobs 2y ago
That's not even crap data - that's archived data that might be useful someday (though de-dupe is probably a great idea and email sigs are definitely wasteful trash) - most of the crap data is things that would never have been useful under any circumstances. I have cleaned up dozens of product databases in cost management efforts and have found anywhere from 50-99% of data stored in product databases is crap, because they are not well managed and any single mistake can lead to a huge outsized impact on storage. What to log all those http requests for just a day? Might as well turn that on for all time...
duxup 2y ago
I ended up working on some software and I was deemed the email guy (it's a very small % of my job but it is the biggest pain). "I need an email when this happens.. and when this happens." The requests are endless and I'm convinced there are people who if they could would do their entire job from their inbox and get everything and anything an application can do via email. The insidious problem is that it never solves anything. "I didn't get the email!" is a constant refrain (yes they did, they always did). "Oh someone didn't do the thing so can you add this to the email too." and so on. It is such an abused tool.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > The requests are endless and I'm convinced there are people who if they could would do their entire job from their inbox and get everything and anything an application can do via email. That sounds like a reasonable goal for a whole lot of job duties. And yes some entire office jobs. (Excluding some direct human communication but a lot of jobs already have too much of that in situations that could have been an email.) > "I didn't get the email!" is a constant refrain (yes they did, they always did). Well having to manually check wouldn't improve that, would it?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I can see how that would work (email centric workflow), not unlike how some people now try to have a chat / Slack centric workflow.
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    Yeah, everyone knows the proper thing to do is orchestrate it all through Emacs.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  We had a similar request for a sales team once: "If this fails we want an email".... Okay, but we never seen this fail, so you'll never get the email. As expected, they never got an email, because no failures. So instead they wanted an email every time the job ran (once every night), so they'd know that the job had failed, if they DIDN'T get the email. Only time that happened was because the email got trapped in a spamfilter I think. There must be thousands of copies of that email sitting in inboxes say: Job X ran successfully @ 04:30.
jeffbee 2y ago
Well "the cloud" will generally store exactly one logical copy of your static jpg, one of the reasons why clouds are pretty good for efficiency. There is really no sense at all in the article's claims that "we are destroying the environment" to do x y and z thing the author whines about. We are destroying the environment to drive a Dodge Ram to the Circle K to buy a 52oz Polar Pop. Information sector doesn't even show up on top ten lists of things that are destroying the environment.
HPsquared 2y ago
It's probably deduplicated on the server though, so the millions and millions of messages with that logo likely share the same piece of disk space. Probably one reason why free providers don't tend to offer End-to-End encryption. It prevents deduplication (and otherwise compressing redundant information).
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  Nope. Back in the day Exchange offered SIS but in 2010 they ditched it. It's plainly not effective any more. Even regarding the OP' "the jpg signature logo" - it's a part of multipart in the message, not a separate file. And one more thing - you can't just turn the dedup and be dandy, now you need to check against the hashes to determine if this chunk is unique or you already have it. And with TBs of data you need TBs of hashes to check. Until you have like 99% dedup efficiency, ie 99% of your incoming data is literally the same data you already have - it doesn't worth it. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/dude-wheres-my-single-instance/595267 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/dude-where...
  - Sprite_tm 2y ago
    Not sure about Microsoft solutions, but modern file systems like zfs and btrfs can do this on the filesystem level, no support from the mail server needed.
    - tored 2y ago
      NTFS and ReFS has both deduplication support (only on Windows Server).
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    Also, I can imagine such schemes getting ditched for the same reasons of "now people can detect whether we already have a copy of the file, which is a privacy hole!" that killed cross-origin caching in browsers. Or if everything in the year 20XX gets pushed into using E2E encryption, since that's pretty much antithetical to deduplication.

by boznz 2y ago

hobs 2y ago

That's not even crap data - that's archived data that might be useful someday (though de-dupe is probably a great idea and email sigs are definitely wasteful trash) - most of the crap data is things that would never have been useful under any circumstances. I have cleaned up dozens of product databases in cost management efforts and have found anywhere from 50-99% of data stored in product databases is crap, because they are not well managed and any single mistake can lead to a huge outsized impact on storage. What to log all those http requests for just a day? Might as well turn that on for all time...

duxup 2y ago

I ended up working on some software and I was deemed the email guy (it's a very small % of my job but it is the biggest pain). "I need an email when this happens.. and when this happens." The requests are endless and I'm convinced there are people who if they could would do their entire job from their inbox and get everything and anything an application can do via email. The insidious problem is that it never solves anything. "I didn't get the email!" is a constant refrain (yes they did, they always did). "Oh someone didn't do the thing so can you add this to the email too." and so on. It is such an abused tool.

Dylan16807 2y ago
> The requests are endless and I'm convinced there are people who if they could would do their entire job from their inbox and get everything and anything an application can do via email. That sounds like a reasonable goal for a whole lot of job duties. And yes some entire office jobs. (Excluding some direct human communication but a lot of jobs already have too much of that in situations that could have been an email.) > "I didn't get the email!" is a constant refrain (yes they did, they always did). Well having to manually check wouldn't improve that, would it?
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I can see how that would work (email centric workflow), not unlike how some people now try to have a chat / Slack centric workflow.
- saalweachter 2y ago
  Yeah, everyone knows the proper thing to do is orchestrate it all through Emacs.
mrweasel 2y ago
We had a similar request for a sales team once: "If this fails we want an email".... Okay, but we never seen this fail, so you'll never get the email. As expected, they never got an email, because no failures. So instead they wanted an email every time the job ran (once every night), so they'd know that the job had failed, if they DIDN'T get the email. Only time that happened was because the email got trapped in a spamfilter I think. There must be thousands of copies of that email sitting in inboxes say: Job X ran successfully @ 04:30.

jeffbee 2y ago

Well "the cloud" will generally store exactly one logical copy of your static jpg, one of the reasons why clouds are pretty good for efficiency. There is really no sense at all in the article's claims that "we are destroying the environment" to do x y and z thing the author whines about. We are destroying the environment to drive a Dodge Ram to the Circle K to buy a 52oz Polar Pop. Information sector doesn't even show up on top ten lists of things that are destroying the environment.

HPsquared 2y ago

It's probably deduplicated on the server though, so the millions and millions of messages with that logo likely share the same piece of disk space. Probably one reason why free providers don't tend to offer End-to-End encryption. It prevents deduplication (and otherwise compressing redundant information).

justsomehnguy 2y ago
Nope. Back in the day Exchange offered SIS but in 2010 they ditched it. It's plainly not effective any more. Even regarding the OP' "the jpg signature logo" - it's a part of multipart in the message, not a separate file. And one more thing - you can't just turn the dedup and be dandy, now you need to check against the hashes to determine if this chunk is unique or you already have it. And with TBs of data you need TBs of hashes to check. Until you have like 99% dedup efficiency, ie 99% of your incoming data is literally the same data you already have - it doesn't worth it. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/dude-wheres-my-single-instance/595267 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/dude-where...
- Sprite_tm 2y ago
  Not sure about Microsoft solutions, but modern file systems like zfs and btrfs can do this on the filesystem level, no support from the mail server needed.
  - tored 2y ago
    NTFS and ReFS has both deduplication support (only on Windows Server).
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  Also, I can imagine such schemes getting ditched for the same reasons of "now people can detect whether we already have a copy of the file, which is a privacy hole!" that killed cross-origin caching in browsers. Or if everything in the year 20XX gets pushed into using E2E encryption, since that's pretty much antithetical to deduplication.