Why archive mailboxes?

[#1]

Just a random question that has puzzled me for some time.

Why do Plusnet archive mailboxes that become "full"?

Now, I understand that there is a mailbox limit. I also understand that it can be cheaper to "archive" things on bulk tape or whatever than to keep them on disk (or at least that used to be true).

However, this forum has a constant string of people asking for archived mailboxes to be restored. That requires some time and effort from Plusnet employees - and some inconvenience for the customers concerned. So any saving in disk space must be outweighed by the cost of handling all the restore requests.

Also, back in the 1980s disks were quite expensive, both to buy and to run. These days there are multi terabyte data centre disk drives available quite cheaply - e.g. 24TB WD UltraStar for ~£600. Using slightly smaller capacity drives makes them slightly cheaper per TB, but slightly more in power use. If a user mailbox is 1GB one drive can hold 20,000 user mailboxes. That makes the disk cost per mailbox around 3 pence.

I'd guess the cost of archiving and restoring a mailbox will be at least a few pounds - so there is no possibility of saving any money. So if not to save money, why do it at all?

Also, a second question is what medium do Plusnet archive them to? I've worked in places where tapes were used, then DAT, then optical disks, but these days I don't know what is actually cheaper and has more capacity than hard disks - so I'd be interested to know what archive mediums are used these days (I'd guess another disk - but if so why bother?).

[#2]

@corringham  You have asked a very good question, which I have wondered about. What happens to these archived mailboxes, where do they go and to what storage medium, or are they just compressed and stay on the same storage. The endless requests for de-archiving must be a significant burden on Plusnet employee's time. It just seems that adding a bit more cheap storage capacity would improve the situation. Of course you could always argue that users should manage their mailboxes better and delete ancient unimportant emails but I have to admit I do not always do the required maintenance, but I do not use Plusnet email and have a much larger storage capacity available.😊

[#3]

I imagine the real answer to this is "historical", i.e. that's the way it was once (maybe for good reason) and given PN is exiting mail services they have zero incentive to change anything.

[#4]

@RealAleMadrid , @HPsauce I suspect you are both correct.

I'm sure it is historical. Disks used to cost a lot - my first SCSI 40Mb disk cost over £300. 

But times change - and unfortunately Plusnet hasn't.

One of the strangest aspects is the deleted e-mails in the trash - they count as part of the storage allowance, but most (all other?) e-mail systems I know remove deleted e-mails after a period (typically 30 days). It is often the deleted e-mails that take users over the limit because once they've deleted them they forget about them., They don't realise they have to empty heir own trash.

As for e-mail storage, I allow each of my users 100GB (that's £3 worth of disk), and I'll increase it when they get close. I also allow individual e-mails of 100MB (it used to be 50MB but apparently that was too low). 

EDIT: I should maybe add that for the past 20+ years I have always found it far cheaper (orders of magnitude) to add more disk space than to spend time selectively deleting e-mails.  

[#5]

A bit off the wall, but I remember a VERY long time ago when I worked for a BIG computer manufacturer, and was pretty much a full-time resident at the main offices of one their biggest UK customers, looking at their mainframe archiving processes.

In those days it was tape that was used, lots of them, all of which involved manually loading and unloading - very time-consuming and manpower expensive.

We analysed a statistically sound (I'm a mathematician) large representative sample of the tapes (that kept a few operators busy for a few days!) and very quickly realised that slapping on a few more disks and changing a few first-level processes was unbelievably more cost-effective.

[#6]

Modern storage might indeed be cheaper than it once was, but commissioning it is not a simple job of swapping drives. There’s deal of engineering and systems management required … which all costs money and brings risk.

Whatever, people’s nature is never to modify behaviour until boundaries are found and firmly imposed ... and then to squeal like children when they can’t have just want they want. If the threshold were increased to 3, 5 or even 10GB users would still put off doing basic housekeeping until they hit the ceiling … and complain that there’s a limit.

The real issue is that everyone makes inappropriate use of email through shipping large attachments to emails (photographs etc) rather than sharing a link to cloud based storage. Such brings about the storage of a large amount of junk. I confess to my own mailboxes being over full … due to large attachments on multiple emails which I desperately need to extract and file properly. Using proper document repositories is not hard, but it seems alien to most folks.

[#7]

I'm guessing the majority of email users just want to send/receive them without concerning themselves as to their intricasies. As long as it 'works' what else is there to consider.

Being a non-physical medium, unlike real rubbish, they simply don't see it building up.

[#8]

I was going to keep out of this but - because there is only me who uses my mail accounts - I have one here, two Apple ones and one with my current ISP, I could, in theory, switch my PN ones to IMAP and not worry about getting close to the 1GB limit for quite a while.

However, and this could just be me, I see no point in cluttering up my machines storage capacity with rubbish when it could be more productively used for other purposes, so once a message is read, I extract and save any pictures/documents I might wish to save, bin the actual mail and religiously once a week empty the recycle bin. I also once a month move any actual emails I have retained - such as order acknowledgements/invoices &c - to external storage.

That way I don't have loads of possible crud cluttering my machine up.

[#9]

@jab1 Good practice. 

In working environments I've often seen users using the deleted folder as part of their filing system.

This in turn questions the legality of the Companies automatically deleting the deleted folder contents.........

[#10]

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@Champnet wrote:

@jab1 Good practice. 

In working environments I've often seen users using the deleted folder as part of their filing system.

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Some peoples 'systems' amaze me - but then I remember the saying 'there's nowt as queer as folks' 😀

[#11]

John,

What you point to here is ownership of your mail … as opposed to abandoning such responsibility. Most keep everything just in case - personally that comes from a professional history which encountered significant litigation … if only we still had those critical emails. My employer had 100MB limits on mailboxes - making in comparison Plusnet’s 250MB and 1GB mailbox limits utter luxury - but we did not use email as a pseudo storage system for shipping around massive image files. Needing to archive email on each and every laptop was a ball ache and utterly bonkers!

Not using email to ship and store large files would make a 1GB storage limit a non-issue for virtually all users.

[#12]

I understand what you are saying, @Townman . However, for the average home user, is the vast majority of received mail of such importance? As I said earlier, any mail I possibly may need to refer to later is moved to external storage, but the vast majority of what I, and probably most home users, receive is 'read and delete'.

I don't recall what my employer had as a 'personal' limit on boxes on the corporate network, but I think (bearing in mind I've been left 22 years), I seem to recall they had a 1-year 'live' corporate record and unlimited 'archive' - although, again from memory, they stripped out non-commercial communications before archiving.

Sorry if I've misinterpreted what you have posted above.

[#13]

The thread has diverged a little from my original question of why archive full mailboxes, and moved more towards good e-mail husbandry.

While there are a lot of differing (valid) views that have been mentioned I'd summarise mine as follows

• there are environments where keeping records (including e-mails) is required - even personal tax matters should be kept for the 7 previous tax years, some insurance records for 40 (that is a legal requirement for public and/or employer liability insurance - I have boxes of such), and in many business settings everything forever. There have even been recent legal cases surrounding politicians that have deleted records that should have been kept. Of course I wouldn't trust Plusnet e-mail for such archival purposes, but some people might.
• Use of the trash can as storage is just plain bad practice. An ISP emptying trash after 30 days isn't an issue - most e-mail providers do this, e.g. gmail. In any case Plusnet have no liability for the loss of e-mail, whether it is in the trashcan or your inbox.
• When most people delete an e-mail and the system moves it to the trashcan, it is considered deleted. The thought that they then have to delete it again by explicitly emptying the trashcan doesn't occur to them, as Plusnet's e-mail system is the only one that never removes e-mails from the trash after some period. Simply routinely emptying old e-mails from the trash after some period would avoid the vast majority of cases where a mailbox reaches the limit.
• The question of large, or multiple, attachments is a matter of opinion. E-mails that are much larger than 100MB may not be accepted by some MTAs - so that's the limit I allow. On the other hand e-mails with lots of links to document repositories are more likely to be blocked by spam filters (especially Plusnet's). Personally I find receiving attachments better than receiving a link as attachments are included in my back-ups, whereas any documents at the end of some link are not. I'd have to manually fetch them and put them somewhere locally that will be backed up.
• Being tidy and spending time curating e-mails may work for some people. Personally, disks are so large, and computers are so fast at searching, I don't consider it worth my time. I delete spam and other unwanted e-mails, have a large hierarchy of folders with rules to ensure e-mails are filed appropriately, and that is it. After 20 years my mailbox occupies less than 0.5% of a 4TB disk.

Returning to my original question, how does archiving a mailbox that has reached its size limit help the user reduce its size? It has to be retrieved before they can empty the trash. Seems a lot of effort and expense for no benefit to anyone.

[#14]

@corringham 

"as Plusnet's e-mail system is the only one that never removes e-mails from the trash after some period"

For the record and avoidance of doubt, each week (IIRC Monday for PN & F9) anything in deleted items, deleted more than 8 days previously is expunged from the trash folder.  The other legacy brands are done on other days of the week.

The trash can is not a forever safety net on the Plusnet platform.

As for "the only one" - certainly my @outlook.com account does not clear the trash can.

Gmail (web interface) is very clear on its policy - "Messages that have been in the Bin for more than 30 days will be deleted automatically.".

[#15]

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@Townman wrote:

For the record and avoidance of doubt, each week (IIRC Monday for PN & F9) anything in deleted items, deleted more than 8 days previously is expunged from the trash folder.  The other legacy brands are done on other days of the week.

That's good to hear. I must admit that I understood that didn't happen due to the number of people who have their mailboxes archived due to large amounts of mail in the trash.

Anyway, my original question remains - how does archiving full mailboxes help?