Email amnesty
I was in DC earlier today, and I noticed that I wasn't able to send or receive email using Outlook. I figured it was just Starbucks/TMobile bossiness. But no.
No blogging tonight because I'm trying to quickly clean up my mailbox before it stops working altogether. The problem? Nearly two gigabytes of mail — sent mail, deleted mail, hoarded mail, yet-to-be-responded-to mail, mail I like to look back at, forgotten mail, funny mail.
It turns out (I didn't know this) that no Outlook “profile” can handle more than two gigabytes. So that particular identity of mine had become nonresponsive. The guy on the phone said that the profile might have been corrupted and urged me to leave all the mail behind. With much ceremony, he walked me through creating a new profile — a new me — and then we said goodbye.
I'm hoping I can disobey his command because I don't think I can manage without this electronic memory. I also don't want to rely on webmail because I can't always be online, and I don't like either the Google or Yahoo! interfaces for longterm use (although I use both frequently for list mail and other special-purpose mail).
It's been a sobering experience, this evening of mail. My new “me” received a bunch of mail that may never be answered — so forgive me.
Comments
6 Responses to “Email amnesty”
Got something to say?
You should try archiving. It will create additional file with up to 2GB which will store older e-mails. You can create as many archives as your hard drive can hold.
In Entourage for the Mac, you can compact the data file to get rid of wasted space. So I googled to look for the equivalent in Outlook. I found this article: Organizing Outlook Mail
Thanks — yes, I've now enabled archiving. but I think you lose the folder structure when you do that. At any rate, I'm doing it.
I received a message saying that this issue is sort of a Y2K problem for email:
Most programmers recognize several significant numbers - 32768 is the
number where the high order bit goes on in a 16-bit signed number, and
2147483648 is where the high order bit goes on on a 32-bit signed number.
Now 2147483648 and 2 gigabytes bear a striking similarity - in fact
equality.
What hit you was a 32-bit signed number limitation buried in the code.
And no, this won't be fixed by 64-bit operating systems because this
number is locked into the structures of an on-disk file system.
(This same problem is going to start hitting people who use USB memory
sticks bigger than 2gig (or 4gig, I forget which) unless they format
them with a modern file system.)
This should shake loose some memories of Y2K.
But there is a real 32-bit Y2K out there, and relatively few people care
- it is when the almost universally used time format, a 32-bit number of
seconds since January 1, 1970 GMT reaches its maximum value. That
happens sometime in year 2038. That promises to be the real Y2K event -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem.
thanks, Mike. I'm still working on this — the “new me” has a lot of mail that I'd like to respond to, but I have to very quickly forward it to the “old me” without the “new me” receiving it. sigh.
I'll go compact the data file, hoping the folder structures can persist.
no, with archiving you won't lose your orginal folder structure. When you load an archive file you'll find all archived folders in their original position.
Why do you think that you will loose your current structure? it is actually keeping the exact structure you currently having. the only difference is that you will need to keep some accounting of dates (which date range is in which archive)…