[Gllug] [OT] Largest mailbox EVER!

[Nix]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, will at hellacool.co.uk moaned:
> Simon Morris wrote:
>> One users mailbox just came in at:
>> 15,892,736 KB (15.1Gb)
>> Does this guy get the record for largest (and most unkept) mailbox
>> ever???
> 
> I have seen several Gb worth, but never over about 4.  I thing this may be a record.

About two years ago, one of our Holy Directors had his secretary send
everyone a three-page memo. The body content of this memo was about ten
lines of text: the information content was maybe 200 bits (`we will
change our company name but we can't tell you what to yet').

The memo consisted of a Word document containing three enormous
scanned-in uncompressed 24-in-32-bit truecolour TIFs of the text of the
memo, one per page, manually-typewritten on light pink (!) headed
notepaper: each TIF was about 15000 pixels on the long side of the
paper. This being Word, it didn't discard anything when the rescale
happened.

You do the maths: each page was about 585Mb. Each mail was a little over
1.5Gb.

Of course, our appalling mailserver (MS Exchange) didn't realise that it
was Cc: ed, and kept one copy for each person in the company. All 1,200
of them.

Oddly enough we didn't have 1.8Tb of storage on the mailserver on the
assumption that someone would want to send things like this around, and
as we learned then, Exchange really dislikes running out of disk space.
It also dislikes people trying to read this innocent mail and
downloading hundreds of Mb from the server. The victims' machines also
disliked being hit with 1.5Gb of image data, and thrashed to death.

It took hours to get everyone back on their feet again, and it was days
before we got email back up.

The next day, the director got his secretary to send another copy out.
(But we'd thought of this and discarded them, returning merely some
`mail too large' bounces.)

(Of course, we weren't allowed to replace Exchange with something that
wouldn't die quite so hard when DoSed. Oh no, that would be a sane
response to the problem. Instead we were told to make it work in
future. We asked for an obscene amount of money to handle the storage
costs, and got it. One must have one's headed notepaper emails. *sigh*)

-- 
`Me, I want exploding spaceships and pulverized worlds and clashes of
 billion-year-old empires *and* competently written sentences.'
                                                    --- Matt Austern

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