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.

Comments

Guilty

[thegamerformelyknown]

I must say, I'm very guilty of this.
I only tend to delete spam. It DOES get handy when I need something though.
3 gmail's search.

Re:Guilty

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Why feel guilty? It's a good database, with a pile of space. You're going to forget, your hard drive is going to die, your house is going to burn down with all your notes inside, you're going to get fired. What's left? Your Hotmail account, your Gmail account. I pay 20$ a year for virtually infinite data storage with incredible reliability. With Gmail, I get it for free. I pass e-mail between the two for redundancy and as a result the only thing that will kill all my data is an apocalypse or massive economic failure.

They need it all and they need it all the time

[ARRRLovin]

It's not uncommon for users to have several GB of email on the server and multiple archive files. Disk is cheap, backup windows are MASSIVE. At what point does reliability outweigh convenience? According to users? NEVER.

Sounds like a Press hit to me.

[Hoch]

PR As stated, trend reports are almost always PR. At least it isn't a dupe.

I want a real RDBMS

[leandrod]

I really love my 600 MiB FastMail account, specially because it's IMAP -- the main reason for my avoiding GMail up to now.

But searching sucks, and I depend on Evolution to do virtual folders. I'd love it even more if my email server was actually a true RDBMS where I could have, besides the traditional IMAP interface, a D (Tutorial D or D4 or something the like) language interface where I could query at will, and save my queries as views that would show up in IMAP as (virtual) folders.

BTW, even non-relational ISO SQL would be so much better than what we have now.

People switching from hotmail

[spidereyes]

One possibility is that Hotmail's market dominance could be affected by rival services better equipped to search through thousands of e-mails.
You're telling me. I've had about 10-15 people fed up with hotmail ask me for Gmail invites and they're spreading them to friends and family as well afterwards. Lately I've been having trouble with hotmail and completely switched over to Gmail because of it. I think hotmail had its time to shine, but hasn't been able to keep up with the any of the new services. The one nice feature that Gmail includes that hotmail doesn't ironically is the ability to forward e-mail, unless I'm just totally blind they seemed to have removed it. The other item I noticed is the decrease in spam after I switched, I barely get any and I use my gmail account to sign-up for everything!

...just like the entire planet is guilty

[Roadkills-R-Us]

It must have been a *really* slow news day, or someone at the BBC is rather slow. Techies have been doing this since the 1st email message was received, and everyone else has been doing it since they discovered email.

I know a small handful of people who tend to keep their email cleaned out and very small. For everyone else, it's a huge. mostly convenient database.

This "story" is only about 1% less sill than reporting that "recent study shows people prefer to breathe than to stop".

Re:...just like the entire planet is guilty

[Total_Wimp]

Although I agree with you that this is not exactly news, as a recent email administrator I'd have to say your numbers are quite a bit off. In our organization, it's pretty close to roughly split between "cleaners", "savers" and "hybrids". I don't get this from anecdotal evidence of what I saw when helping out end-users either, but rather from looking at the mailbox sizes for everyone in the org.

"Savers" are easy to spot. They delete almost nothing except spam. We have quite a few users who would need a couple of the two gig Gmail accounts to hold all of their data.

"Cleaners" are also easy to spot. When someone has been with the company for 5+ years and their Exchange mailbox size is less than 20MB, you know they're not using their email as a database. These folks feel real stress when their email stretchs beyond the end of the page. My boss is one of these and he has very little understanding for why anyone would need a lot of email storage.

The "hybrids" are more difficult to spot. Many are not true hybrids, but actually "savers" who archive email semi-regularly. True "hybrids" delete most stuff, but whatever they deam "important" gets put in a nice mailbox folder tree. Over time these can become quite large, but it's never as bad as with real "savers". My purely subjective and anecdotalo observation is that these folks make up the most "normal" email user group. If you have three friends and two of them are freeks, the normal one is probably a "hybrid" email user.

I'm personally a "saver" who archives semi-regularly. Thanks to me, we basically don't have strict email limits anymore and people can store almost as much as they'd like. We never harrass VPs with multi-gig storage. But I have a lot of respect for "cleaners" too. For some reason, they never really have the problem of missing data that us "savers" are so worried about. The "cleaners" are like those folks you know that have absolutely no clutter in their houses, no junk drawer and no closet full of old hard drives. The truth is that we're afraid of losing things we "may need someday" but they know the truth is that we'll never find it in the clutter anyway, so why live with the clutter to begin with.

TW

What I would like to see

[John Seminal]

Is there any technology that a sender can use to nuke their own email after a set amount of time? Any technology that can disallow for an email to be copied or saved? I would like to see a streaming DRM email system, where I can control how my content is used. For example, I don't want past girlfriends posting emails I sent them 5 years ago, especially to girls I am now interested in.

Back in the days of paper, people had document shredders, if they did not want a record of a conversation it was easy to convey information without having a record.

Re:Managers never delete email

[barzok]

My employer's former CEO and COO kept less than 2MB in their mailboxes from what I understand. The reason? So there was no trail of anything, no record of any possible wrongdoing on their part, etc.

David Gelernter's Lifestream

[AsOldAsFortran]

Computer scientest David Gelernter proposed a organization for all the material we produce as a "lifestream", a date-stamped list of all electronic documents in our lives. When I first heard of I thought, naa, too ill-organized.

But, I find my email working in exactly the way he proposed. My email package provides the best database I have of my work and communication. Searchable by date, correspondent, content, subject; control-click to organize by date, sender, header; automatic filters to sort by same; subfolders; attachments of all kinds accessable by the search; and I can add to it from anywhere by emailing myself. I use email to mainain to-do (email myself), I use email to maintain a calendar of past activities by searching for email on the topic (when did we do X?) , I use email to store minor documents and search for them as attachments. By using pop and downloading all email to my harddrive, I have no limitations of an account.

So, while dubious about "lifestreams", I've backed into it as the core of my work habits.

Nothing new here, shall we move along now?

[shanen]

Well, except maybe for the 1 GB versus 2 GB error everyone is commenting on. A new error is not very interesting. However, I do have two substantive comments to offer:

In spite of Google's business principle against evil and in spite of the my frequent use of gmail, I think it is fundamentally bad and potentially evil. "Possession is nine points of the law", and there is no good reason for Google to be in possession of *MY* email. A few GBs of storage is *NOT* the issue, and I have plenty of free GBs right here in my possession, even including space for the indexes. Perhaps Google really is a good company and they will never abuse the power of possessing someone's email--but the historical evidence does not support that belief. Every power gets abused sooner or later.

In simplest terms, here is the threat of online gmail: Would you want your worst enemy to have access to all of your email? If you have put it into gmail, then all it would take is a single password leak.

The constructive alternative is obvious. Gmail should live primarily on your own disk, preferably integrated with the Google Desktop. The nine points of possession would remain on *YOUR* side, since you would still possess all of your email.

Many extended services could then be built on that model...

Wow, 2 gigs...

[John Seminal]

I remember when I could not afford a 2 gig hard drive. I remember how hard it was filling my hard drive with useless programs and games. Now I have 2 gigs for email!!

I am suprised the RIAA has not gone after email companies yet, they have to be an attractive target. It is going to be an easy way of sharing MP3's. I might have a CD, rip the best songs to MP3's and email all my friends. Hell, maybe we'll even form an email group that does nothing but share MP3's. I wonder if the RIAA will come after them if that becomes the next trend.

Why on earth would a person need 2 gigabytes for email? If it is a company, they must have their own storage, nobody would want to trust a free email account for buisness.

Re:Managers never delete email

[painandgreed]

At the huge corporation I work for, our company policy is to delete everything by default ASAP.

Our company has the same policy, probably for the reason of destroying such a paper trail. The supervisors and other people of responsiblity who aren't in their own offices with secretaries aren't buying it and are asking for instructions on how to store emails locally and then make back up CDs of same.

Re:Mb vs MB

[zerblat]

Actually, 1 MB is 1,000,000 Bel. There's no universally accepted abbreviation for byte. Some people use B, some use b. If you want to avoid confusion, spell out the whole word.

Re:Worst. Submission. Ever.

[poot_rootbeer]

Every respectable mail client from pine through gmail allows you to save mail to folders other than "Inbox". Anyone who does not take advantage of this feature, and allows their inbox to grow to hundreds or more megabytes is a damned moron.

Inbox is for messages you have just received or otherwise still require your attention. If you got it four years back, it doesn't belong in your inbox.

When you get a magazine subscription via snail mail, do you leave your back issues out at streetside, clogging up the mailbox, or do you bring them in and store them in a rack or closet? Why would electronic mail be any different?

why I don't

[confused one]

I don't erase e-mail, because I'm tired of people telling me they "never said that." I've been burned in the past. I'll not be burned again. By saving years worth of e-mail I've been able to defend and protect myself as well as have the satisfaction of throwing it back in their face(s) from time to time.

And, yes, I keep archived copies of my .pst files so they can't "accidentally" disappear from the server.

Re:A few email tips I try to live by

[MobyDisk]

Okay, I'll bite. I do 3 of the 4 of the things you mentioned, and I find it highly productive. One thing I've learned over the years is that no one can tell you how to organize. Different systems work for different people. (And some people are hopeless) I have several friends who swear by Franklin Covey. Others who hate it. Let me show you what works for me, since it matches your "suggestions" very well.

• My Inbox is my to do list. I see many people use their paper inbox (or equivalent) as their todo list. (Actually, I think it is the most common system I've seen people use.) I would use it too, except that I hate paper. Why would you have something in your in-box, if there wasn't some action to be associated with it? If I want me to do something, I send myself an email.
• I do not allocate time to process my Inbox. I do that when I complete a task (an email), when I receive a new email, or at regular intervals. It's like an OS: process for a while, then task switch whenever you get an interrupt or after a fixed time slice.
  I do agree that stopping of the Nth message without having gone through them all will cause things to pile up. This is a function of scheduling. Read through all your tasks before embarking on any one.
• I look at email as soon as I get it. I may get an email every 15 to 30 minutes at work, and every 4 hours at home. That isn't a problem. If you get more emails than that, then you aren't managing the people around you properly. I know many managers who get 100 emails a day. IMHO, they aren't managing properly. Status messages and FYI type things should be done at regular meetings. I treat snail mail the same way.
• Agreed! Even better, try physically travelling to them! I hate people who send 15 emails back-and-forth when a 5 minute meeting or conversation would be better.

I think it's a great idea!

[CokeJunky]

I ended up writing an essay of sorts to respond to this item. It's long -- I decided not to waste the time of anyone not interested in what I had to say, so I am not posting it here. The short-short version is that:

• This is a good thing
• it is an emergent property of email technology and the role of email in everyday life
• it happens because email forms a chain of events related to your life that maintains temporal and spatial relations of information
• this is good for finding things you might want again
• I think services like GMail need to expand on this idea and continue to add features that make email a better personal database -- searchable on more axies, and good at filtering out the noise

If you are interested, read my http://www3.telus.net/cgapeart/2005/04/email-as-pe rsonal-database.html rant/essay.

Re:Mailinator

[Hal The Computer]

I've used both and I prefer mailinator.

In short, you don't have a mailinator account, you can check the e-mail for any account you can name.

Tell the nytimes your email is nytimes@mailinator.com. THen go to mailinator, type nytimes into the account box and check the mail. Heck, there might even still be emails from someone elses nytimes account signup. (they purge them regularily though)

Disappearing Inc, aka Liquidmachines.com

[billstewart]

A few years back, Disappearing Inc. made a system to do that. They've since become Omniva and were recently acquired by Liquidmachines.com. Their tech guy gave a talk at a Cypherpunks meeting back when they announced their product, and I was fairly impressed. He started off by explaining what the product doesn't do, because there are lots of things people would like to do that are sufficiently impossible that anybody claiming to do them is selling snake oil. Their objective was limited to supporting private communications between two cooperating parties who aren't trying to work around the system - so they weren't claiming to protect your email from one of the parties using a screen-scraper, etc. This is radically different from the DRM market, where one party doesn't trust the other party and wants to limit what the recipient can do with the information. They basically use plug-in to email/browser etc. that stores a session key with their server, encrypts the email message body with the session key, and lets the recipient fetch the session key to display the message, but never stores the message in cleartext. When the expiration conditions occur (either expiration date or one of the parties says to delete it), they delete the session key from their server. So the sender's and recipient's mail systems only handle the encrypted information, and if they're running backup systems, the backups only contain the encrypted file.

So if your girlfriend is willing to keep your notes in read-only format, and send you notes in the same format, then it'll protect you, or if your unindicted co-conspirator wants to stay unindicted, then you won't get an Ollie North what do you mean the email's backed up on optical WORM disks?!?!? surprise. But if your girlfriend cuts&pastes your email to her diary, she can later post it to alt.sex.ex-boyfriends.losers, and if your co-conspirator prints out emails because it's easier than reading small type on screen and then stores them in his file cabinet, you can still get busted later. Also, if the Feds hand a warrant to the privacy server operator requiring them to hand over any keys they have for mail to or from you, and they have any keys they haven't already deleted, you lose, but any keys they've already deleted are gone. (I think they also did a version of the keyserver for companies that wanted to maintain them in-house.)

Mother-In-Law's AOL id as Thin Client environment

[billstewart]

No guilt about it - she's paying them whatever their current price is, and she keeps all the stuff she's interested in on their servers. Of course, she's never really figured out Windows file systems, or why she should use them instead of creating mail folders inside AOL. (:-)

It's been very useful for helping maintain her system - when Somethine Bad happens to her PC, whether it's spyware or bit rot or hard drive problems, whichever child is nearby can just format the disk, reinstall whatever generation of Windows is handy, get a new AOL coaster (I picked one up in the hotel lobby last trip :-), and she can log in and all her bookmarks, email, buddy lists, etc. are all there right away. We did have to buy an actual install-from-scratch version of XP once, because she'd lost the old Windows ME disk, but WinME was such a loss that scraping it off the disk and getting rid of Compaq's "helpful" system backup software were a pleasure anyway.

Meanwhile, *my* mom's still happily using her decade-old Mac Performa 630 with System 7.x, Netscape and Eudora, keeps her data on disk as text files that she backs up to floppy, had to buy some more RAM a few years ago so a new printer driver would work reliably, and her only real problem is that her local Mac repair guy retired and no longer makes house calls. It's much more reliable, but she's never been afraid of technology.

Re:Mb vs MB

[dunkers]

I'll agree that there's no universal standard, but the convention is:

Actually, the convention used to be B for bits since datasheets were typed and everything was in caps. Then some techy wannabe used b because it made sense to him (and no-one else in the know) and off it went the wrong way, just like loads of other stuff: component side PCB tracks were blue and solder side red, for instance, but now everyone uses the reverse because some git who thought he knew the convention, but didn't.

Not long after that the datasheets switched to D instead and we left all you know-it-alls to your own devices :)

Screw the phone

[jefftp]

Don't pick up the phone. I don't want to waste time talking to you when I could be getting work done.

I definately don't want to see you in person unless it's a social visit and I happen to have a moment of freetime.

I want you to list out, in written detail, exactly what you need so I can reply, in written detail, with useful information. Be clear, consise, and detailed.

I plan to pull up this email next week when you claim we never discussed the topic. I'll kindly remind you that we did discuss the topic and you agreed to take care of your business. If I asked to record the phone call, you'd probably have a panic attack.

If you really have something important to discuss, you can write it down. Spoken words are meaningless and forgettable.

Phone calls are interruptions that require my full attention. Emails can be replied to as my time becomes available.

Outlook to Gmail

[jgold03]

I'm still waiting for Gmail to let me upload my Outlook.pst file.

Re:Managers never delete email

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good grief. This is the same whining that results in beefs like "my boss has poor communication skills". I work in an area surrounded by introverts. The quality of our often collaborative products would be improved if these folks would stop shooting emails at each other and have a f-2-f conversation.

When I'm within 50 feet of a person and can close the loop with a face to face encounter...I'll always choose that over email.