Slashdot Mirror
100 GB Email Account
soccrates writes "An article on Toms Hardware describes a Californian company giving out 100 GB email accounts to its customers. They even extended a challenge to get the first user to completely fill up the account, the winner getting a 1 terabyte account !
"
suso.org has already been doing this for 7 years for over 80 local customers. I basically don't have quota support in the kernel. So its not just for email. My philosophy is that if you don't give people a limit, they won't try to reach it. And guess what? It works. People don't abuse the service. They use it normally. A couple of users are exceptions and have over 1GB worth of email that has amassed over the past several years.
I'm getting ready to install a server with 200GB of home space, so thus its like I offer 200GB email accounts. Whenever I get close to running out of space, I upgrade.
I think Google (or anyone) shouldn't have a problem just giving people "unlimited" email space (and then whacking abuser accounts who mount gmail-based filesystems to store terabytes of pr0n...). For legitimate users of the system:
1) It's text, compress it, save space.
2) If you have a large user base, chances are there are many duplicate emails floating around the system. Hash everyone's email body-content globally. Then when that stupid email gets forwarded to 6000 of your customers, it only gets stored once for each unique form it arrives in. Ditto for mailing list emails.
3) Make sure that your spam filter is really good, and especially that it never falses tosses legit emails, so that people trust it. Anything that's in the spam box gets autokilled in a week.
4) Limit attachments to reasonable sizes. You're trying to stop people from email-attaching a 700MB uncompressed cd rip, or whatever. Gmail currently limits the entire message, all attachments included, to 10MB in size. They do other stupid things too though, like not letting you send zipfiles... A better system that leaves more freedom for the user might be to say that all attachment types are legal, but if a message's total length exceeds 10MB, then attachments in it will be "flagged for deletion", starting with the largest attachment in the message first, until the number is under 10MB. These larger "flagged for deletion" attachments get forceably deleted from your email archives after 24 hours, or 3 days, or something of that nature. In this way you can still transport large files via email, you just can't archive them there.
Once those simple measures are in place, you can largely rely on statistics and reasonability. If a reasonably average webmail user actually received and archived over a gig of mail in a year under such a system I'd be impressed.
11*43+456^2
you mean something like
for i in `seq 20`; do dd if=/dev/random of=file$i bs=5M count=100; done
?
This way, where ever you go, your tunage is on tap. It might takea while to DL, but so what! I know if my house was ravaged by some Tornado or Hurricane, and all my CDs were blown to flinders or washed out to sea, I would definitely appreciate the back up...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The problem is, one persons spam is another persons ham.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
It all depends on perspective.
Of course, there are common things that neither party wants, but giving a one size fits all filter for all but the most obvious will cause false positives.
Don't you think the big mail companies would have sorted it out by now if they could? They have the largest harvest of spam around.
[I was going to stop here, below are just random ramblings]
Having said all that, I believe every person should be allocated a bloom filter with their mail classification preferences. This filter is used against the results of all the identification rules.
All the mail companies should accept this token and display mail which passes. Currently, I have 4 mail providers who deal with spam differently, I would like to setup one set of rules.
The good thing about using a bloom is that preferences can be merged increasing the effectiveness, for instance, a virus filter, a fakes filter, a childsafe filter, or an office filter, developers filter etc.
Of course, this way, we don't change the front end mailing system itself, and people who don't use this token are free to handle the mail however they like.
I'll stop wafflin now.
liqbase