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E-mail As the New Database
jira writes "BBC has an article confirming the trend of using inbox as a sort of personal database. At my workplace I can personally attest to the growing sizes of those pst files and an unwillingness to erase any emails because of 'loss of information'." From the article: "The trend has become more pronounced as the services have dramatically increased their storage capacity in response to upstart Gmail offering a free service with 1,000 megabytes (Mb) of storage." Update: 04/22 23:03 GMT by Z : To reflect that the story is at respected news organization BBC, not a BBS.
Gmail is up over two gigabytes now.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Mb = Megabits MB = Megabytes
8Mb = 1MB
I hope this clears things up!
Yep. I do desktop support and nobody wants to delete anything. that's their paper trail and the one email they delete may mean their job down the line as people are looking for somebody to blame and heads to chop. Most communication is done through email with proper CCs (and sometimes BCCs) and they require it even between people sutting next to eachother just so there is that paper trail at a later date. When they've told somebody or reported an issue, they want to show proof they've done so later if somebody else drops the ball and there are people looking for blame.
Sure, but try synching that inbox to your PDA. I will be first in line for the windows CE phones with 2 gig HDs.
No, that's what Mailinator is for. (to hit confirm when you sign up for a service like nytimes).
Welcome to Mailinator(tm) - Its no signup, instant anti-spam service. Here is how it works: You are on the web, at a party, or talking to your favorite insurance salesman. Wherever you are, someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you're gambling with your privacy. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don't need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot. Pick jonesy@mailinator.com or bipster@mailinator.com - pick anything you want (up to 15 characters before the @ sign).
Later, come to this site and check that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you're done - you can walk away - an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. Its an anti-spam solution for everyone. The messages are automatically deleted for you after a few hours.
Let'em spam.
Mail and Usenet are the two hardest things to backup. A large mail system or a usenet feed can have hundreds of thousands of tiny files being added and removed per minute (if you use a single mail file, a few kilobytes written to the end of the file every couple of seconds, followed by 1 GB of data being copied over itself because the user finally erased that first email from the head of the file since they were over quota.
Seriously attempting to keep a backup of this mess means mailservers that refuse to delete a message that hasn't been on the server for more than one backup cycle. It means using either a checkpoint/snapshot filesystem or mirrored RAID array then pulling out one of the drives to perform the backup from, then putting it back and hoping that it synchs up before it's time for the next backup.
This is why nobody bothers doing this for usenet. Too much work just to save some porn.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.