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I used to ask what a company's email quota was. Not a big deal at my last two employers, but previous jobs (banking and state government) had very low quotas, s

I used to ask what a company's email quota was. Not a big deal at my last two employers, but previous jobs (banking and state government) had very low quotas, something like 20-50MB. At levels that low you can't just archive your email, you've got to decide what stays and what goes and carefully file away any attachments you might want to retrieve in the future. Not only a waste of time, but it adds unnecessary cognitive overhead to the simple act of checking your email.

derekp7 14y ago
Generally quotas are only implemented on the server. So the easy way to work with that is to set up a rule to automatically move all your incoming mail to a local folder. Of course this does break the ability to access your email form multiple clients, or use web mail, unless you have the rule set to replicate locally and let mail sit on the server for 7 - 14 days.
- bdavisx 14y ago
  You can't do that if you're in a job where everything has to be accessible by either lawyers (discovery) or security -- well, there are probably ways to handle that, but it's just easier to not allow local folders for email.
nathan_long 14y ago
That's an incredibly outdated policy. A 4TB hard drive now lists for $150. This means that 50MB costs a fraction of a penny, and the price is dropping. Every second that a minimum-wage employee spends deleting emails to get down to that low a quota is a flagrant waste of money. The higher-paid the employee, the more flagrant the waste. This is seriously like paying your employees to collect individual pieces of pine straw so you can save money on landscaping. Not to mention the fact that those emails probably contain data that's worth more than their storage cost, especially if they're searchable.
- T-hawk 14y ago
  > That's an incredibly outdated policy. Indeed. Hence the question is a useful filter, to identify and avoid companies who have incredibly outdated email systems and technology policies. They won't be leading-edge in anything else either. Similar: "What does your company use for email? Lotus Notes?" (Unless you're applying to IBM itself.)

derekp7 14y ago

Generally quotas are only implemented on the server. So the easy way to work with that is to set up a rule to automatically move all your incoming mail to a local folder. Of course this does break the ability to access your email form multiple clients, or use web mail, unless you have the rule set to replicate locally and let mail sit on the server for 7 - 14 days.

bdavisx 14y ago
You can't do that if you're in a job where everything has to be accessible by either lawyers (discovery) or security -- well, there are probably ways to handle that, but it's just easier to not allow local folders for email.

nathan_long 14y ago

That's an incredibly outdated policy. A 4TB hard drive now lists for $150. This means that 50MB costs a fraction of a penny, and the price is dropping. Every second that a minimum-wage employee spends deleting emails to get down to that low a quota is a flagrant waste of money. The higher-paid the employee, the more flagrant the waste. This is seriously like paying your employees to collect individual pieces of pine straw so you can save money on landscaping. Not to mention the fact that those emails probably contain data that's worth more than their storage cost, especially if they're searchable.

T-hawk 14y ago
> That's an incredibly outdated policy. Indeed. Hence the question is a useful filter, to identify and avoid companies who have incredibly outdated email systems and technology policies. They won't be leading-edge in anything else either. Similar: "What does your company use for email? Lotus Notes?" (Unless you're applying to IBM itself.)