Students Warned To Reduce Inboxes

Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) will send e-mail warning messages this week to FAS affiliates whose e-mail inboxes contain more than 40 megabytes (MB) of data.

And eventually users will be required to reduce their inboxes to no more than 10 to 20 MB.

The effort to reduce inbox size is the first step in a HASCS plan to eventually increase the capacity of each user’s overall account.

“The most important reason we’re doing this now is that we’re planning to increase everyone’s account size from 50 MB by default and 100 MB on demand to 100 MB by default and 200 MB on demand in the near future,” wrote Kevin S. Davis ’98, coordinator of residential computing and a Crimson editor, in an e-mail.

The warning message, sent only to those users actively checking their FAS e-mail accounts, asks recipients to reduce their inbox sizes below 40 MB within 14 days of the e-mail warning’s arrival.

But Davis said that 40 MB is only a “soft quota” and that no e-mails will be deleted to enforce the newly added quota.

If individuals do not meet their quotas on time, HASCS will move their old inboxes to a newly-created saved-mail folder, accessible through all e-mail programs.

According to Davis, reducing inbox sizes is crucial to HASCS’ effort to double account storage space, which it hopes to do “in the near future.”

He said that the new inbox quota would make the system faster and more reliable.

In addition, users run a greater risk of inbox corruption and e-mail loss when inboxes are larger than 10 MB, according to Davis.

System administrators record that 75 percent of backup requests following inbox losses are submitted by users whose inboxes had contained over 10MB of data.

“From our perspective, this is a very minor change with big benefits to everyone on the system,” Davis said.

He added that users would be asked eventually to reduce their inbox sizes to between 10 and 20 MB, a capacity that he said can reasonably satisfy most users’ e-mail needs.

“Most e-mails, unless they contain attached files or documents, are about 2K to 5K in size,” Davis said. “You could have thousands of regular messages in your inbox and not hit the quota.”

He said 85 percent of inboxes are already under 10 MB, limiting the impact of even the most restrictive limits being proposed.

“I got 156 messages over two weeks, but they didn’t even reach one [megabyte], so although the bigger account the better, I don’t think [the new sizes] will really affect me,” said Sarah Sclarsic ’06.

But for those with bulky inboxes, Davis suggested two “quite easy” ways to reduce inbox sizes—users may save old messages to saved-mail folders or delete them.