 Email: It’s use approaches design limits
By: David Moon |
History of Email
Before we had the Internet, there was ARPANET. A very basic version of the Internet, ARPANET came into existence at UCLA back in 1969. Slowly, ARPANET expanded to include other institutions around the world. As you can imagine, back in 1969, technology was not what we have today. But, shortly after the computers became linked, a method for sending text messages was developed and email was born.
Email was conceived as a method of sending simple text messages to other users. These messages consisted of just the letters, numbers and symbols found on the keyboard. And in reality, email has not evolved beyond the basics that it started from.
Modern Day Email
Today’s email has moved from the simple text message to an alternative delivery method of everything electronic. But the foundation on which email was developed, that of a text based system, is being pushed to the absolute limits of what it was designed for.
Because email was designed more for simple text based information and was thus supposed to be relatively small in size, the entire structure, including mail servers, was developed accordingly. Most mail servers have limits on the total size of the post office for all users for all emails. Up until recently, Microsoft Exchange servers had a built-in 16 GB limit (only the much higher priced Enterprise version went beyond this limit only a couple of years ago). Today, Exchange 2003 Standard has a limit of a whopping 75 GB.
While this sounds like a large limit, it needs to be considered in the context of how email is utilized today. Most users have Outlook connected to an Exchange server. The typical email user does not delete their emails so every message is left stored on the server. It is not uncommon to find users with 4 GB of email after a couple of years of use. If just 20 people in the office all do the same thing, the 75 GB limit would be exceeded by 5 GBs!
What is the cause of such large email usage? Attachments are the biggest culprits. Often a picture, Word document, PDF file or scanned image is sent as an attachment in an email. These types of attachments are not simple text. So an email system must convert the electronic file to a set of numbers and letters and then convert it back on the other end to the original format. While this task is somewhat simple, the real problem is the size of the attachments being sent today.
Think of email as a letter or package and the Server as a Post Office. From a one-page document, a thousand-page document, or even an X-Box delivered to a child for Christmas, these things can be sent with relative ease and reasonable cost through the U.S. Post Office. The Post Office center was designed mostly for envelopes but can handle the smaller packages delivered by individuals.
Now think of the suppliers of the X-Box systems who send large boxes containing many of the smaller individual boxes. Would they use the U.S. Post Office to deliver to all the stores? No, they would use a freight company because the larger boxes could be 50 lbs or more. In other words, email can handle small attachments to few individuals, but it shouldn’t be expected to handle larger emails with extremely large attachments.
One can equate the weight of a package with the size in GB of an attachment. An Exchange server is not best suited for a 50 GB attachment, especially when users allow the attachment to be stored on the Exchange server indefinitely.
What happens when a user takes 10 documents which are 10 GB in size and send to 10 different persons? First, the total attachment size is 100 GB. But for the server to process and send out to 10 different people, it must process 1000 GB or 1 Terabyte (TB) of data. This would bring almost every standard Exchange server to a standstill. While the Exchange server is busy trying to process that email, all other Exchange duties come to a virtual stop and users will notice very quickly as it will appear that their server has crashed. And indeed it may have if it is completely unable to handle that large email, but if it did not, the system could be so slow it is unusable for hours or even days.
Does this happen? Yes, oftentimes because users do not pay attention or don’t understand the ramifications of what they are doing when sending email. But there are things which can be done to prevent a critical piece of technology from going down.
Set Limits
Every Exchange server has limits which can be imposed on all users or on certain groups of users. The first limit is the size of attachments in both sending and receiving. This will keep people from bringing in a CD filled with pictures and then sending it out to all their friends and family. This is a very typical culprit for bringing down an Exchange server, as users may attach multiple pictures to an email, then send to everybody they know. With the size limitation for sending emails set, it can be ensured that no one will accidentally try to send an email too large for the server to easily handle.
By setting the limitation for receiving email, it can also keep someone from sending a large attachment to you and consuming the limits of your Exchange Store size.
Many times these mistakes, while costly, are accidental on the part of the sender. However, it can be deliberate if a disgruntled employee, angry client, or an opposing party with some technological know-how decided to use this to their advantage to try to bring down your Exchange server by sending multiple huge attachments over and over again.
There are other limits that can be imposed on the users’ accounts to limit the amount of email which can be left on the server. A good method for determining the limits is to take the maximum size of the Post Office, subtract 2% for a buffer, then divide this among all the users on the server. By doing so, it will prevent a person from just storing needless email or from an outside person from crashing the server.
Arguments Against Limits are not Valid
Why do users hate setting limits on their email? The first argument is the thinking that most emails must be saved. While there is validity in this argument, most firms have a better place to save emails. It could be in a document management system or a practice management system. In fact, by doing so, the client’s case related email is not limited to just one person, but is available to all who work on the case. Users who don’t utilize the available alternative to store their email oftentimes don’t because of laziness or lack of training. Setting the limits forces the user to change their ways for the betterment of the firm.
The other user complaint against limits is they may have a legitimate need to send 100 GB of scanned discovery to a person. However, there are better methods of sending such large amounts of data. A relatively low tech method is to burn it to a CD and mail it. Other alternatives is using a better suited technology such as an FTP site or even using a Web based interface to a firm’s document management system to allow a person to upload/download a document.
Conclusion
An email system has been a great invention. Like most inventions, it is used beyond the way originally intended. Until a new evolution in Mail Servers and even the data lines with which the email travels is created, users need to stop some of the bad habits they have developed over the years. It may seem to the average user that email is a logical choice for sending large amounts of data, it needs to be understood that it was never intended for that use and they need to use alternate methods.
About the Author
David Moon is the founder of Lan-Tech, Inc. a systems integration company specializing in law firms since 1993. Mr. Moon holds a Masters in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and was the winner of the 2005 Legal Technology Consultant of the Year Technolawyer @Awards. He has assisted many law firms in implementing technology solutions to become more efficient and improve total revenue. He holds certifications in Worldox, Tabs3, PracticeMaster, Time Matters, Billing Matters, Summation, Concordance and Citrix. Mr. Moon can be contacted at 770-514-0400 x12, or by email at drmoon@lan-tech.com.
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