Charles on… anything that comes along

You want a reason? Because I’ll delete the attachments (and if I’m feeling a bit bugged, your email with it) straight away.

I’ve come to understand the reason Jack Schofield and all Guardian tech writers hate attachments. It is this: we have very limited mail quotas. That is, if the size of mail with our name on the server exceeds some number (in my case 50MB) then we can’t send any more mail.

I only joined at the end of November. Within a week, I think, I was up to 47MB. I deleted as hard as I could.

So today I got a message from the mail system:
This email has not been sent. Your current mail file size is 53 megabytes. This is over your quota of 50 megabytes. You will not be able to send anything until you have deleted some email, and your mail file size is back under your quota. You can still receive and read email, however.

No chance for me to find out what the unsent mail was though. Nor whether it’s been saved to be resent. But that’s an internal issue about the email program we use.

So how do I choose which emails to delete? Simple - sort them by size and kill off the largest first. There is an option to delete only the attachments, leaving just the stub of the email (which some inspired people might have entitled “Press release” and have as its contents “Please see the attached press release”. I’ll get a lot out of that.) But it doesn’t always work, so in those cases I just zap the thing wholsesale.

Just another reason why press releases don’t work, at least when used wrongly…

Though of course you could send it to my Gmail address. No limits there. Well, there are, but they’re 40 times greater.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Live, PR, live in the 21st century (19 November 2010; score: 55.62%)
• Yeah, sure, just send the phone anywhere. Who cares where they say they live? (6 March 2008; score: 55.45%)
• Is Plaxo on OSX any good? Or, indeed, any use? (6 April 2006; score: 54.44%)