You've Got Mail -- Tons Of It

Daniel Goldman writes "The Baltimore Sun has an article about the City of Baltimore's email problem." A snippet: "Millions of old e-mail messages are clogging Baltimore's municipal computers, so the city is going to start automatically deleting any messages older than 90 days. A common practice in private business, the move raises questions when made by a municipality, which has a responsibility to retain certain public records." Goldman points out "Just think about all the potential law suits; 'if it's not there, they can't subpoena it.'"

Comments

Client-side storage is not a good solution

[Vandil X]

i don't see what the big deal is. im sure if they droped $100 into each computer for a 80gig+ drive there would be plenty of space for -gasp- email

Obviously you have never had to manage an IT budget in the commercial or government sector. IT spending is way down. Buying (and installing) a $100 hard disk drive for each employee at the City of Baltimore would be a horrendous expense, let alone for your typical company of 200 users.

There's also a bigger problem with client-side archiving: workstations go down. Be it from OS/software failures to hardware failure, the client-side solution is a nightmare waiting to happen when it comes to the protection of important data.

A better idea would be to write a script to go through each user's mailboxes every month, export any old emails to text, store the files on a server that uses a journaling filesystem, index the emails, and compress them.

One or two XServe G5s could do the trick quite well.