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.

Re:Great way to ignore your customers

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy never stated anywhere in his post that if a message isn't read in 89 days, it hasn't yet been ignored but if a message hasn't been read in 90 days, it has been ignored. He merely was replying to the actual story rather than being a pedantic asshole. Stop posting on Slashdot you unoriginal fuck. You are merely trying to reinforce your belief that you are intelligent. Not only is this incorrect but it's wasting the time of people who actually read what you post on Slashdot - you dumb fuck.