"It's
a MailBox, not a Closet"
By Dick Bednar
The University’s email servers are wonderfully reliable
machines. Of four servers, there have been only three failures
in the past 18 months. Unfortunately, the same one failed
all three times – once 18 months ago and then again
in January and in February. Over 800 faculty were without
access to email, calendar, and contacts for over 30 hour each
time. 99% reliability is only an average. At any instant,
either it’s “up” or it’s “down”,
and down means “dead”.
The recent episodes revealed that a
number of people on the campus are using their MailBox as
a storage facility, rather than a place to send and receive
messages. Although most users get a warning message when they
go over 15MB of messages, some users have accumulated 100’s
or 1,000’s of megabytes. The MailBox is a wonderful
place to keep stuff. Good old Information Technology backs
it up every night. It’s available from almost everywhere
– from the office, from home, from an Internet Café
in Albania!
There is a price for this convenience.
When the server fails, there is a LOT more to restore from
the backup tapes. And, the email server WILL fail again. That
much is almost guaranteed. It may not fail for several years.
Or, it may fail tomorrow.
Getting “behind” on email
seems a lot like the Labors of Hercules. At some point, there
are so many messages accumulated in the MailBox, and so many
new ones arriving every day that a person becomes overwhelmed.
It’s just impossible to clean up. No one has hours and
hours to spend sifting through thousands of old emails to
figure out which ones can be discarded.
Fortunately, there’s a quick and
easy solution. Just turn on “Archiving” and tell
the computer to put every message more than six months old
into a folder on the hard drive. (I personally archive everything
more than three months old.) All that stuff that I wasn’t
going to get around to anyway is now OFF the server and not
taking up space on the backup tapes. Directions for how to
turn on Archiving can be found in Outlook’s help files,
and Employee Training & Development has an excellent tutorial
on their web site. In 10 minutes, I went from over 750MB of
messages to about 100MB.
It’s a little embarrassing to
admit, but the messages that I seem to want 99% of the time
are less than three months old. Sure, there’s an occasional
need to dredge up a message from the dim past, but that can
wait until I’m in the office.
Until others reduce the size of their
MailBoxes, restoring the email server will still take more
than a full day. I don’t want to be without my messages,
my calendar, and my contacts for that long, so I turned on
the “Cached Mode” feature of Outlook 2003. This
places a copy of everything in my MailBox on my desktop computer,
while leaving the original on the Exchange server. Now, if
the server fails or the network breaks, I can get to everything
I had right up until the moment it lost contact.
Of course, I can’t make new appointments
or send messages, but then neither can anyone else. At least
I have the things I was working on, know what my appointments
are, and can look up telephone numbers.
Since we “moved up” to a
cable modem at home, I turned on Cached Mode on our home computer
as well. Now, I have one copy of everything from the last
three months on the server, one copy on the University desktop
machine, and one copy at home. The office machine has all
the old stuff that I’m “too busy” to go
through.
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