At 10:11 AM -0500 2/2/1997, Eric Thomas wrote:
>On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 01:55:42 -0500 Brad Knowles <brad@his.com> said:
>
>> Well, we already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
>>Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending attachments),
>>this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox storage space
>
>I have no problem with that, however it would be really nice if people
>were allowed to accumulate more mail as long as the total did not exceed
>20M or whatever quota you felt comfortable with. Maybe even as a premium
>service costing another $2/month or whatever.
One problem, as I see it, is that it is easy to count how many
messages are in someone's mailbox (just look at how many pointers
they have to messages), and if they're over a certain number, then
they've got a full mailbox. This is something you can do very
quickly.
If you now want to see if they're over a certain quantity of
mail, measured in bytes, instead of just slicing through the mailbox
and counting how long it takes you to get to the end, you now have to
store message size along with the pointer to the message, and run an
accumulated total as you're walking down that tree. It doesn't sound
like much, but do it tens of millions of times a day, and you'll
quickly accumulate a lot more CPU time than you thought possible.
We'd probably have to add several dozen more terabytes of disk
storage (because the average mailbox size would grow *dramatically*),
and it takes a lot of work just trying to find space, power, and
cooling for that kind of equipment.
What it would cost to add this to the billing software is another
matter -- we might need several dollars per month additional just to
cover the overhead incurred by having to add this to our billing
procedure (including the overhead of having to go through and count
how many messages/how much space each of our eight million-plus users
is taking up).
I'll pass this on to our developers, but it's not something we
could just drop in overnight. We might have to redesign the way we
store our mailboxes, and would certainly have to not only get out
from behind the current eight-ball, but get far enough ahead of it
that we can then take a major performance hit (by adding this
feature) and still be far enough ahead that we don't get behind it
again.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer <http://www.his.com/~brad/>
finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Keys and Geek Code
The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at <http://www.his.com/~brad/sendmail/>
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