Today was my first day back at work after a two-week holiday.
I expected to spend a bit of time trawling through all the email I receive, trying to spot the important ones from the spam *, but lo, what was this?
30,000 messages.
About 380MB of email.
My mailbox limit at work is approx 80MB at which point I can’t send emails, or perhaps reply to an urgent request for assistance.
No problem, I thought, I have set up filters to put unwanted messages in special folders or delete them. Unfortunately, Outlook’s useful filters only run when Outlook is running and it catches up at about one message per second.
If I “Run filter in this folder” it zooms at about three messages per second, or 2.7 hours… but it does it with a modal (ie prevents me from doing anything else) dialog box.
I discover that emptying the trash is a bit quicker, so I abandon the 3x turbo mode and try to manually delete messages.
I then discover that Outlook cannot do anything to more than 4000 messages at once. In fact anything above about 2000 causes it to complain about lack of memory, or just crash. And it still takes tens of minutes to move a few hundred message to trash.
So I finally get my email down to a manageable size and able to send email by 3.10pm.
My first email out? “Hershey’s bucket of goodies on my desk - come and get it.”
PS. spam, in this case, includes useless messages like “service A on host B took slightly too long to do C” and I can’t do anything about that 
3 Comments
Never been a huge fan of Hershey’s, still, good effort on the quantity
You want to set up some server side rules that pick up emails about service A on host B taking slightly to long to do C. File these in the trash D so they are not there when you return from being on holiday in location E. Or, if I may be so geeky, recode the apps to send out an initial warning email and then a summary at the end of the day, logging everything else. 30,000 emails sounds like a baaaad design
I do have such rules, but in this case, the messages types were new whilst I was away
And sadly, I have no control on the reporting source.
And yes, it is a baaaaaaad design, but there’s nuffin I can do about it
To jump on the “Outlook Sucks” Bandwagaon, I just posted my year-in-the-making list of “67 Reasons that Outlook Sucks”.
http://wanderingstan.com/2008-02-01/67_reasons_that_outlook_sucks
And I didn’t even find the same sucky things that you did!
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