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One thing I often run into is that the financial people at our University regularly send Excel spreadsheets to one another. There will regularly be email chain

One thing I often run into is that the financial people at our University regularly send Excel spreadsheets to one another. There will regularly be email chains of 3+ people that result in the same document being sent back and forth by email 10 times in one day. And then I get complains that people are hitting their email quota of 500MB. The problem seems to be that you can convince individuals to switch to using a shared folder on a server (got my department using one) but they can't seem to make everyone switch. They've got email, it works well enough, and now it's hard to switch.

derefr 17y ago
Perhaps set the quota params so no [internal] message can be more than ~10k or so? If everything is forced to be in shared folders, users stop being defaulting to email.
tptacek 17y ago
Take the median salary for a financial person, mark it up to fully loaded, and compare: 1 minute of productive time: $1.10 1 copy of a 500MB XLS file: $0.04 Seems to me, the financial people at your University understand computers better than your IT people.
jokull 17y ago
If it's exactly the same file, mailservers (at least some) are clever enough not to store it for each instance. New features in ZFS are also, apparently, clever enough not to store two files in two places. But yes, shared volumes or Google Docs is probably the way to go.
smcq 17y ago
Technology can fix this! It was never the users problem to begin with... MAX_ATTACH = 50 * 1024 #50 kb def minimize_size(msg): if size(msg['attachment']) > MAX_ATTACH: upload attachment to s3 like storage insert link into email body return msg It obviously needs fleshed out (I bet it ends up around 20 lines of python after everything is said and done). But seriously, the fact that your users would ever even need to think about this is just wrong.

derefr 17y ago

Perhaps set the quota params so no [internal] message can be more than ~10k or so? If everything is forced to be in shared folders, users stop being defaulting to email.

tptacek 17y ago

Take the median salary for a financial person, mark it up to fully loaded, and compare: 1 minute of productive time: $1.10 1 copy of a 500MB XLS file: $0.04 Seems to me, the financial people at your University understand computers better than your IT people.

jokull 17y ago

If it's exactly the same file, mailservers (at least some) are clever enough not to store it for each instance. New features in ZFS are also, apparently, clever enough not to store two files in two places. But yes, shared volumes or Google Docs is probably the way to go.

smcq 17y ago

Technology can fix this! It was never the users problem to begin with... MAX_ATTACH = 50 * 1024 #50 kb def minimize_size(msg): if size(msg['attachment']) > MAX_ATTACH: upload attachment to s3 like storage insert link into email body return msg It obviously needs fleshed out (I bet it ends up around 20 lines of python after everything is said and done). But seriously, the fact that your users would ever even need to think about this is just wrong.