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You've Got Mail -- Tons Of It

Posted by timothy on from the city-that-reads-remember dept.

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.'"

4 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. 100 gig of text? by Neuroelectronic · · Score: 0, Redundant

    with hard drive prices so low, 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. it took me a year and a half just to fill my 60 gig drive with MP3's and pron

  2. E-Pencil Pushing by llamaguy · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Yet another example of buereocracy getting in the way of everyday things. It's basically a lose-lose situation - they can't keep on accumilating email, but they can't delete it either for fear of losing anything important. So the solution? Just add a little disclaimer: "Any email stored in this system is liable to be deleted at any time. By using this system you agree unconditianally to this." Voila. No more problem.

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    HAH! I just wasted a second of your life making you read this, but I wasted a minute of mine thinking it up. DAMN.
  3. Google to the rescue! by interociter · · Score: 1, Redundant
    Seems like a perfect application of Google's mail technology. Baltimore has tons of mail which needs to be searchable. Google has a scheme for holding and searching large quantities of mail. Plus, even the spam is worth keeping, should Baltimore decide to file suit against someone for attacking the City's technological infrastructure by flooding their servers with spam. Scott Richter, I'm looking in your direction.

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    Interociter
    -=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
  4. This shouldn't be a problem. by Entropius · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Millions of old emails?

    They say it "could be as high" as ten million emails. Well, the mean size of an email is probably around 10k, so that's 100GB of old mail.

    100G of storage costs about a day's wages for a city bureaucrat.

    The main problem they mention is that "it takes too long to make daily backups." That doesn't seem to be the mail system's problem--why are they making *daily* backups of static data?

    If you want to make daily backups of your mp3 collection, you don't copy the whole mess every day. You look for new files and copy only those.

    I'm not saying they necessarily need to keep all that old mail. But there's no technical reason why they can't.