The amount of data isn't actually that big. Emails are in fact generally quite small and text compresses very well. Even if you give people large quotas, it's also true that a lot of your customers don't actually use them anyway - they already have gmail or hotmail email accounts that they use instead. The main system I administer is full allocated (i.e. number of users * user quota = available disk space) but in fact the disks are less than 10% full - so you can massively 'over allocate' your storage. If you aren't one of the massive ISP (talk talk etc) you'll have thousands of email-active customers max, with a quota of say 100Mb of email. Even so that's room for 10 million average sized emails per user.

You're talking a few TB of storage in the worst case scenario. That's one rack mount server with a RAID cluster of disks - heck if you're stingy with quotas it's a RAID mirrored pair. Have two servers for service redundancy. You'd probably also need a couple more to deal with the client access load but they don't need storage, just RAM. You could probably serve 5,000 users with simple IMAP and a basic webmail interface on... say £30K of hardware. Replace every three years.. £2 per user per year.IMAP is more bandwidth heavy than POP but you're an ISP, if you're worrying about how much bandwidth your users are using locally, you're doing it wrong. It won't cost nothing but if each user's bill went up by 20p a month, I don't think they'd even notice.

Seriously, basic email is cheap & easy. It's been around for 30+ years, it's pretty much bomb-proof. It's when you throw crap like BES and Activesync and IM and VoIP and all the rest of the crap in with it that it gets complicated.

Jon

Don't forget about attachments. I have a reseller account and some of my clients use their 200 mb free limit in about a month. My personal inbox is about 3gb a year.

It may be relatively small compared to things like music, but even my personal email is several gigs. If you're a relatively big player with millions of customers, that's petabytes of storage that someone has to pay for. That's why free accounts rarely give you more than a few hundred megs of storage; enough for POP but not for IMAP.

The free exceptions are the very large players like Google, where the storage is ad-sponsored.

Also my send box is about 2gb, so that's 5 there already. My mail server is for four employees and needs about 35gb for mail storage and I archive and delete anything from the year before last every January.

Someone I know who is a Facebook friend claims to be a writer. Her posts are regularly strewn with grammatical errors, but this latest one really makes me weep.

Re-reading it, maybe the joke's on me and she's being super clever. Given the frequency of her apostrophe errors, I doubt it though.

She doesn't know how to spell 'liars' either.

We re not typical people. The main system I administer has users with huge mailboxes - over 10GB easily. However the majority of users are not at all like that. The majority get 'some' email and don't get a lot of attachments. As I say, with a sample set of 10,000 people, the average is somewhat less than 100mb. That's a much more statistically significant piece of data than half a dozen people on an internet forum. My email store is more than 100mb, but I would never claim myself to be at all typical in this regard.


I did specifically say the information quoted applied to ISPs/providers that weren't in that category. If you're serving several million email accounts, you obviously need an entirely different arrangement.

Jon

Just been sent this petition link via Bookface.

1. Which nuclear inspector?
2. Is this Caesium in the reactor or in the building?
3. Is the reactor crumbling or just the building around it?
4. How about an attributable source regarding this "pool ... of cesium"?
5. How about an attributable source regarding the radiation estimates of such a circumstance?
6. Which seismically vulnerable area around the pool? The building? The complex? Fukushima prefecture? Japan? The Pacific?
7. Seeing as Caesium
   
   
   • doesn't readily capture neutrons and so can't be easily artficially decayed
   • doesn't play nice with water or pretty much anything else
   • is usually left to decay on its own
   ... what is it you actually want Japan or anybody else to do?
8. Seeing as the IAEA, the UN's Nuclear watchdog, has not made any mention of such an occurrence and seemingly doesn't know about it, how exactly do you know about it?
9. Why hasn't any of the multitude of people you say know about this informed someone other than a slacktivist website?
10. If the UN doesn't know, it's useless; if it does know then it's complicit. Either way, what exactly is your petition going to achieve?
11. Do you actually have any evidence?

What utter tosh.

I heard some crap about this a few weeks back. Just ignored it.

+1

Bin day?

Thankfully not.

You got what you asked for by signing up Complaining about tosh on Facebook is rather on the level of complaining about the mendacity of politicians and the dampness of the ocean!