Don't be an E-mail Hog!


  
E-mail messages can quickly accumulate in your INBOX folder. If you "live-and-die" with e-mails, you soon could have hundreds. Especially, e-mail messages in your INBOX folder will remain indefinitely in the CEE Unix network system mail directory (/var/mail) regardless of whether you read them already or not, as long as you do not delete them from your INBOX folder.

You may say "so what?," however the disk space allocated to the system e-mail directory is a finite one as you know very well, and this system e-mail directory is shared by all CEE Unix network users.

Now, let's think about a worst case scenario. A user "Imhog" has been keeping all his old e-mails in his INBOX folder over years, and many contain huge attachment(s), something like 4.5 MB just by each attachment size along (eh, MP3?). However the user "Imhog" never had deleted any of his old e-mails. One day, "Imhog" received another huge e-mail with a number of big attachments (let's say another 10 MB) from his friend, and that e-mail exhausted all remaining space in the system e-mail directory.

What happens next will not be a laughable matter. Since all system mail directory (/var/mail) was used up, no single incoming e-mail would be received by the CEE network server regardless of which reciepient it supposes be (not to mention a user "Imhog"). Now, due to one careless user, all other users in CEE network would be affected - not able to receive valuable e-mail communications and the original senders in other sites would scratch their heads over the unrealistic error message e-mail bounced from CEE server saying "Not able to accept your e-mail..."

O.k., now I admit that I'm exaggerating a bit. But you get the point. FYI, CEE system mail directory was allocated to a decent size (and can quickly be add new disk space if necessary) so that it is highly unlikely for you to have any sudden surprise. Secondly, size of unread e-mail files for all CEE users in the system mail directory are constantly monitored so that whenever the remaining space of system mail directory is getting too low, you top 10 "e-mail hogs" will recieve an automatically generated warning e-mail nicely saying "please delete or save old e-mails."

What you need to do is to delete e-mail messages you do not want, and use "folders" to organize messages you wish to save. (Yes, I mean good "housekeeping") A folder is a collection of one or more e-mail messages that are stored so you can access anytime without losing them. This is just like a subdirectory tree structure in your Unix account.

Thank you for your good "housekeeping!"