On Aging SPAM
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006I logged into my Wildcat Mail today just to see if there was anything of interest. In fact there was, but it wasn’t the mail I’d received, that was all junk. It was the size of my SPAM folder.
23 megabytes! Oy vey! Currently the student email system catches SPAM before it gets to your inbox and sets it aside in a SPAM folder. Once a message has been there for 60 days, it’s delete forever. So, my account has received 23 megabytes of SPAM in less than 60 days. Making a big assumption, if we figure that every student who has an email account also has roughly 20 megabytes of SPAM, that’s:
(20 MB x 30,000 students with email accounts) / 1024 = 586 gigabytes of SPAM on the campus mail servers.
That’s roughly 1/3 of the disk space that the campus needs to ensure each student can have a 50 MB quota for their mailbox.
Even if my mailbox has twice the average amount of spam (since it’s been an active account for 6 years) that’s still close to 300 gigabytes of SPAM.
Now, I know they say storage is cheap, but if the policy was modified to permanently expire SPAM after 30 days, instead of 60, it’s reasonable to believe that we might be able to reclaim a few hundred gigabytes of disk space. That could translate into an increase in the quota size for student e-mail. Granted, that increase might only be 5-10 megabytes, but for my money, it’s a more productive use of disk space.
