Business E-Mail Storage

How large can I make an e-mail?

The size of an e-mail is really dependant on the recipients inbox. Most companies limit that to 5 mgbs. This means you can only send an e-mail which is under 5 mgbs. If I attach documents to my e-mail, that makes the size of my e-mail 6, 7 or 10 mgbs and therefore it's going to get bounced back to me and it's never going to get to the recipient. Knowing that can save some effort in terms of communicating and perhaps zipping something up to a smaller file or sending it in a different format to make the size of the email smaller.

Where is e-mail stored?

E-mail is physically stored onto your hard drive, onto your C drive, and then from there PST folders, as they're called. These are storing largely your e-mail, and sometimes your calendar, your contacts and tasks, and other things that you may be doing in some of these applications, like Outlook or Lotos Notes or Entourage. Most companies are taking PST folders after a certain period of time, so they might chunk that down to a 6-month or a year-long block, and then they'll put it onto a tape, almost like a VHS tape, and those will then be loaded onto a truck and driven out. Indeed there's enterprises and companies that provide services to back all those tapes up. And typically they're stored in very secure places somewhere out in the middle of the desert, in some iron mountain reserve where it's all locked down. And that's for a lot of reasons; for litigation, or in case they need a record of something. And so what we typically think of deleting an e-mail is wrong. It's still really there, and it's just a matter of tracing the breadcrumbs back to where it might have been stored.

How will a person sending me an e-mail know when my mailbox is full?

What actually happens for the sender that sends you an e-mail when you're over the limit is they get a bounce-back, saying your e-mail does exist, but it'll say this e-mail has bounced-back as the person is over their limit. Or it'll have some encrypted message like, "SMTP is not accepting IP 007". This is again telling you that they're not accepting your e-mails at this point.