Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
What is the point of a quota system that does not limit the
received mail? And if it does limit it then we get irate calls from
people complaining that sally sue sent them a message and got it
returned. Of course, sally sue never reads the error message
and tells our user that their e-mail box is too large - or if
she did, then irate user thinks it's our problem.
Um, well, that's not exactly how it works.
System messages and "guranteed delivery" messages always get through.
Messages that will take a user over quota are held for a configurable
"grace" period, and the user is warned that they are over quota at a
configurable repeat rate. Messages are returned to the sender after a
configurable hold period. there are plenty of knobs for you to turn. . .
Not to mention the user thinks their inbox is -on their mac-
not on our mailserver, since of course they are entirely
unaware that their applemail has the setting flipped that
leaves a copy of the message on the mailserver.
Sending them notifications is worthless since they don't know what
they are, they don't know how to shut them off, and 3/4 of
the time they think they are spam anyway.
The whole point of this is customer management. Your average mac
user is as dumb as a stump. As long as things work they assume
everything is hunky-dory. If things stop working they NEVER
assume it's their Mac that's the problem because Steve Jobs
told them Mac's are infallible and they worship the ground he
walks on. And of course, if they stop working they stop working
at the worst time for them, (late at night on Friday) because of
the laws of Mr. Murphy. So by the time they get ahold of us
they are hopping mad, they assume it's our problem, and the Pope
himself could tell them that it's their own stupid fault and
they wouldn't believe him.
Well, it's true that most users don't know much, but it's my experience
that many admins don't know much more. . .
Naturally, if things start getting slow they ALSO
automatically assume it's our problem - but they generally
are not emotional to the point that they won't listen. So
they call in, expecting to "inform" us about something we
are doing wrong - whereupon we have to tell them that their
Mac that they believe is infallible is really fallible because
Apple's programmers are idiots and select retarded defaults.
That's a terrible blow to their world view, and it's often about
the most that they can digest.
It's very similar to what I tell admins when they get "winmail.dat"
attachments they can't read. Yep, Exchange isn't very compliant.
But the key here is that when they get off the call they are
fixed (because their Applemail is now correctly deleting the
mail that it downloads) and that they DON'T believe that it
was "our problem", and they have actually learned something
about how e-mail works.
I can also see your next argument - if we inform them in advance
that their mail client isn't deleting the mail it downloads
that we might avoid this. The problem is that first, we don't
know in advance if they are running a large mailbox because they
are dumb-as-post mac users, oblivious to the world, or if they
are running a large mailbox because they are running IMAP or
some such that doesn't have that problem with the mailserver.
If they do know what they are doing, and we call them, we look
like idiots, and it's annoying to them, or worse they get the
impression we want them to go away. Second, if they are dumb-as-post
users, they automatically assume that if we tell them to change a
setting in their Applemail, that it's because our mailserver is
screwed up - because, after all Macs are infallible, and everything
that Apple does must be the One True Way to setup a computer.
It's really better in the long run to make them come to us, not
for us to go to them. If they come to us at least they are
acknowledging that there's a problem. Remember, problems with
computers are very frightening to people who are ignorant about
computers. Think about it, you don't know squat about your car's
transmission - so if a mechanic tells you your transmission has
a problem, your going to be scared to death it's going to cost you
thousands. Your average Mac user will go into denial when they
have a problem with their Mac - they will refuse to believe for
the longest time that there's a problem even when it's obvious
there's a problem to a blind monkey. They have to believe there's
a problem before they are even willing to be educated in how
to fix the problem.
As I said, this is customer management. Just keep in mind that
when your dealing with the general public, the more ignorant the
person you work with, the more likely they are to assume they are
right, and you are wrong. For us to win at the game we must
educate the users, and the most ignorant of the users will only
open their minds for knowledge for a very short time, before it
snaps closed like a steel trap, and they will never believe
there's a problem unless they see it for themselves.
After all, just think of your average conservative Republican's
reaction to Global Warming. It's not something they can see and
their brains are (apparently) incapable of imagination so they cannot
imagine that Global Warming is real, that's why they make silly
arguments like "global warming must not be happening because
we are having a pretty cold winter" It's the same principle in
operation here.
Well, it's the devil you know vs the one you don't. I was offereing a
solution that doesn't slow down. If you don't think it would help you,
then you don't have to look at it.
jay
Ted
Jay Plesset wrote:
Many of my users use the various quota settings in Messaging Server.
You can set quotas on message number and/or mailbox size.
Notifications are sent to the user, even if they're over quota. . .
You can set quota individually, by "class of service", or globally.
Yes, it'll run on the same hardware you're running now. On Redhat 4
or 5, or Solaris.
jay
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Jay Plesset wrote:
Geez, unless your users are into the millions of messages, maybe
you need a more scalable mail server. My day job is support of
the Sun comms suite. I only get these when there are litterally
tens of millions of messages in an inbox.
Where we generally get these problems is when users are running MacOS X
and using the included free Apple Mail as a POP3 client, because one
of the DEFAULTS of that client is to leave a copy of the mail message
on the server. The typical scenario is that we get one of these users
who runs it this way for a couple months, then one day their relative
starts e-mailing them 50MB pictures of their latest vacation, and once
their e-mail box exceeds 800MB in size, popper (qpopper) starts getting
really slow in downloading the message ID list and their client starts
running like a dog.
There's probably many ways I could fix it, from replacing qpopper to
going to faster disks or more powerful hardware, or running a nightly
script that squawks about the bad citizens, but I frankly don't
feel compelled to allocate all of our POP3 users a gigabyte of disk
space for their mailbox, and if did fix it then I'd have to setup
quotas on /var/mail
Doing it this way penalizes only the users who engage in the
objectionable behavior, and it penalizes them in such a way that it
doesn't cause them to lose mail, or cause the server to reject
incoming mail messages to them, or causes mail they have to be
truncated. And
it also doesn't do it in a way that is sudden - the user just starts
noticing things getting slower and slower and slower over time - so
they have plenty of time to contact us at their leisure.
I suppose that one of these days the author of qpopper will rewrite
the search logic in the qpopper program to fix this and then I'll have
to find some other way to gently enforce this.
Ted
jay
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Sean Leinart wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Leinart [mailto:slein...@fscarolina.com] Sent:
Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
To: TJ Russ
Cc: allison.ays...@lonesource.com; Spamassassin Mailing List
Subject: Email / Inbox Speed Problems
Hi TJ,
Looking over your Inbox situation, you suffer from the same
problem as most here do. You have too much email stored on the
server. Can you give me a rundown of the folders that can be
eliminated in your Inbox, we can archive them off then delete
them from your folders that are online, this will help a great
deal.
Thank you,
Sean Leinart
Network Systems Engineer
First Service Carolina Inc.
Raleigh, North Carolina
United States
slein...@fscarolina.com
919-832-5553
DOH!!
List, please disregard the erroneous CC: post to the list.
I had to look twice since it was the identical problem to what
we deal with every week around here.
Ted
