* When your users hoard their e-mails
Monday morning, and it’s time for round 200 in what seems to be a never-ending battle with my e-mail administrator. Typically, it goes something like this:
E-mail from my company e-mail admin:
“Dear Mr. Karp: You currently have 151M bytes of e-mail. This means you have exceeded your e-mail quota of 150M bytes. Please delete unneeded files to come into conformance with your ….”
E-mail from Mike:
“Dear E-mail Admin. Thank you for your recent note regarding the quality of my e-mail. E-mail is a hugely important contribution to the flow of corporate business these days, and it is good of you to take the time to mention that I have exceeded your expectations in this important category of corporate endeavor. I take great pride in my writing, and it is certainly flattering to find someone of your estimable character taking the time to comment on my work. May you be showered with appropriate blessings during the work-week. Kind regards, Mike”
E-mail from the admin:
“Dear Mr. Karp: You currently have 152M bytes of e-mail. This means you have exceeded your e-mail quota of 150M bytes. Please delete unneeded files to come into conformance with your ….”
E-mail from Mike:
“Dear E-mail Admin. Thank you for your most current missive. Once again, your succinct prose provides both technical guidance and the type of philosophical insight that most of us have to pay big bucks to hear from a consultant. And all this without having to meet you at a mountain-top ashram! I am, however, concerned that I may be using up too much space on the system, and have a particular worry that your latest message has put me over the top. As a good corporate citizen, I’ll try to delete some files as soon as time allows, but right now, I have work to do. May the beneficence of the Great System Admin shine down upon you. Regards, Mike”
E-mail from the admin:
“Dear Mr. Karp: You currently have 153M bytes of e-mail. This means you have exceeded your e-mail quota of 150M bytes. Please delete unneeded files to come into conformance with your ….”
E-mail from Mike:
“Dear E-mail Admin, While I particularly enjoy your engaging wordplay, I do wonder if both of our times might be better spent in doing useful corporate work – me in providing consulting insight to our clients and you perhaps by inventorying all the 1s and 0s in the corporate database or by mopping up around the Exchange server to clean up after some of those nasty memory leaks. Alternatively, you might look into better methods of e-mail management that a number of vendors are now making available to the public, including us! Yours with diminishing respect, Mike.”
E-mail from the admin:
“Dear Mr. Karp: You currently have 154M bytes of e-mail. This means you have exceeded your e-mail quota of 150M bytes. Your account has been suspended pending deletion of excess data files. Please contact us by e-mail when you have deleted the requisite number of files. Have a nice day.”
Email from Mike: “&^$^%$%!!!”
We’ve become an e-mail-centric society. More accurately, we have become an e-mail attachment-centric society. Fortunately, several vendors really do offer some nifty tools to help us with some of the problems. Next week we’ll start looking at some of these solutions.
