Sentry Technical's TechNotes

May 1, 2009

Email and you, rights versus reason...

Over the past several months I've been researching a solution to a vexing problem that shows up in both large and small organizations.  The problem, if you haven't already guessed, is our ever growing email inboxes...

Not so long ago having a large number of messages in your inbox was little more than an inconvenience.  10 messages or 10,000 seemed to have little effect on performance.  Free email providers like Hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail and dozens of others popped up almost overnight.  At first they offered relatively small storage capacity with most in the 5 to 10 Megabyte range.  With most personal computer hard drives being less than 300 Megabytes at the time that seemed a generous allowance. 

For it's time 10 Megabytes of storage was plenty as most messages were small, had no attachments or had attachments that were usually sized less than 10 Kilobytes. 

As the internet has matured and multimedia and other types of content have become more sophisticated, attachments have become larger.  Early attempts at a smaller more portable document format usually came by way of RTF or Rich Text Format.  File sizes were small and viewable on almost any type of computer but text and format options were limited to keep the documents portable and readable.

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) was one of the early formats that tried to offer print quality documents in a smaller size.  A number of multimedia formats like GIF and JPEG for pictures and Windows Media and QuickTime for video content came along to offer smaller file sizes that could be quickly loaded from a webpage or in some cases sent along as an attachment to an email.

Of course as more capability became possible more demand became inevitable.  It wasn't enough to just have a few lines from a friend in your inbox.  We wanted to pass along that new song clip or perhaps send a resume' to a potential employer for that dream job. 

At first this wasn't much of a problem. If we needed more room we just emptied out our inbox.  Most of what it contained was of little value after we read the message and any attachments were saved off to an alternate location if we felt they were important. 

Things began to change as storage became cheaper.  Now email services were offering 100's and even 1000's of Megabytes of storage.  Email became less of a messaging tool and more of a rudimentary filing system with the messaging text acting as a kind of footnote to an attachment. 

Not long after that, formatted email became possible with its presentation as refined as any Microsoft Word document.  The messages grew in size with this extra content as features such as embedded HTML coding and custom text fonts became possible utilizing instructions embedded in the message by the sending email client.  Still, most of this new capability imposed little burden as many of these features were processed by mechanisms of the receiving email client.  Other clients simply did not process these extra instructions.  Messages grew but messaging clients grew much more with functionality and flexibility that was unthinkable just a few years before.

With increased functionality comes an increased expectation.  Email is now a "serious" collaboration tool often integrated with other services such as internet video conferencing, voicemail, calendaring and contact management.  Simple text messages are left to cell phones and desktop instant messaging clients.  Entire vocabularies are created to suit these new mediums with a format completely inappropriate for a serious business tool.  Email has now become a core application as critical as any other component of a desktop productivity suite.

>>> Fast Forward to the present day...

Now we have some idea as to how we got here.  We've laid the foundation for why email is so important as well as some of the reasons it's become such a problem. 

This part is for the folks who have to manage mail servers and support end-users....

To all the network administrators out there I say this; your users are not listening when you chide them about mailbox size and best practices.  They don't care that your storage volumes are groaning under the weight of all those attachments.  They have no concern about folder item counts or the need to safeguard the data so it can be quickly restored should the worst happen.

All they know, or care about, is that their stuff is where they left it the last time they sat down at their computer or punched up their inbox on their Blackberry or Iphone.  Mailbox size and Item counts mean about as much to them as a Popsicle at the North Pole.  They want it to be as fast as it was the first time they ever opened up an email on their computer.  It is inconceivable to them that 16000 individual messages in a single folder with 3 Gigabytes of attachments should have any effect on their performance.  "It worked before (when it was 4000 messages and 100 Megabytes), it works for other people, there's no excuse for this, apparently you must not be doing your job because I'm doing mine and haven't changed how I do things."

Dear Network Administrators and beleaguered consultants, before you decide to take up an unhealthy fascination with automatic weapons realize this....It's partly your fault....

What, you say!

I'm doing my job; I warned them a year ago that our Uber-64-core-CPU-Godzilla Server would be on its knees if they didn't start taking preventative steps. 

Yes, you may indeed be doing your job as a technician but if you've gotten to this point with a user you've left out a very important part of your job description.  Your role includes training whether you like it or not.  You must educate your users early in the process as to how to properly use their resources.  This isn't meant to be some draconian directive sent from the IT gods either.  Rather, it's helping your users understand how to best utilize the resource you've provided them.  Enlighten them early and you won't have a problem later on.

......Now we're talking to everybody again....

It boils down to two basic tenets of Information Technology;

1. There is no such thing as planning for infinite growth.

No matter how nice the brochure, how entertaining the song and dance or how impressive the suit in the sales presentation, there's no getting away from a simple fact of human nature.  Human desires can never be fully satisfied be it money, friends, power or even the lowly email message.  It wasn't that long ago that 10 Megabytes was considered a big hard drive, that's an email attachment now.   Technology by itself will not solve a problem caused by bad habits that result from a lack of information.  It may forestall or ease symptoms but you'll never realize the full potential of your investment. 

2. There is not and never will be a technology adaptive enough to keep up with the human brain.

Only a human being could come up with cognitive dissonance (holding two conflicting beliefs as true) but that's the nature of the human mind.  The mechanisms that comprise what we think of as intelligence would reduce the most powerful computer in the world to a smoking pile of silicon.  It's not computation or even adaptability that's the problem.  It's the fact that none of us thinks or works in exactly the same way which can cause a problem within the comparatively rigid structure of a computer program.  It's not that we must always stay within the lines but at least stay on the same piece of paper.  Your PC, Server or Mobile device is not as smart as you are it only knows how to operate within the rules it’s been given. 

In technology there are far fewer revolutions than evolutions.  Technology builds on itself using the best parts of what preceded it, Email servers and clients are no different.  Take the example of Microsoft's Exchange Server.  Since version 4.0 each successive version has built on the last.  Major portions have been revised or removed but the basic operation has remained the same.   When Exchange went from version 5.5 to version 2000 Exchange moved its management focus from the exchange server application to the then new Active Directory Database utilized by the Windows 2000 operating system.  The email database still remained a separate entity but was now tightly integrated with the underlying operating system.  Interestingly enough, the foundation of Active directory had more to do with Exchange Server than any new operating system technologies.  Another case of evolution rather than revolution.

So what does this all really mean??

Short and simple, nothing in technology today has even approached the holy grail of set and forget.  Nothing in technology will cure all your problems and last forever, nothing.  Your best hope is that you have quality people on board.  Just remember that things may seem perfect for now but they don’t stay that way without a whole lot of help.

As always, Sentry Technical's available when you need us...