[Gllug] [OT] Largest mailbox EVER!

[Simon Morris]

Yep... this is the best one!!!

> 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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