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The email monster
October 01, 2008
Clive Thompson recently pointed to a post in which Amherst College's IT director provided some stats about the school's new freshman class. The students' tech habits are pretty much what you'd expect - everyone's on Facebook, no one has a landline, laptops have almost entirely supplanted desktops, and the Mac's beating the PC.
What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse.
With the management of email systems growing increasingly onerous, it's hardly a surprise that a lot of colleges are choosing to offload those systems to Google and other cloud providers.
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Comments
One think: e-mail is hardly used as a communication tool. the 6% of non-spam are passwords, and letters from mom; Facebook messages and IM are used as long as there is no attachment to it — hence most legitimate e-mail between students are used to that. I do believe that there are more convenient way to organise documents then as attachments, but the adoption of alternative structures then the folder is insufficient. The only benefit e-mail has is to filter by who sent shares the document with you: hardly a difficult feature to implement.
Posted by: Bertil ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 1, 2008 02:57 AM
Indeed, in the "corporate" world we utilize Google's spam filter in the cloud (a.k.a. Postini). No spam ever enters the network and end users can selectively release or delete what they determine to be spam. Total cloud email for business is not yet ready for prime time due to business and regulatory requirements (e.g. eDiscovery).
Posted by: ITDirector at October 1, 2008 08:03 AM
I've been hearing for a few years now that IM has replaced email in the under-30s for personal communication. This makes sense especially given all of email's shortcomings. But I guess they aren't using IM to exchange files?
Posted by: Kendall Brookfeld at October 1, 2008 09:00 AM
Yeah, my university is currently making the switch from locally hosted email to Google. I can say first hand that the switch for us has had its ups and downs. Sure Gmail has more features, more storage space, much faster servers, etc. Our little Webmail servers just can't compete with Google's powerhouse. But what happens when something goes wrong? I can't just pass a bug report down to my mail admins anymore, no, I get to send it off to Google and pray that I get anything more than an automated response months later.
Posted by: Greg at October 1, 2008 03:24 PM
Cheers Nick! BTW, at "eResearch Australasia 2008" the other day one of the speakers spoke about a New Zealand university wanting to switch to GMail but having a problem with their lawyers, who didn't like that the US intelligence agencies would, quite legally, be able to access any of that mail.
Posted by: Conal at October 5, 2008 09:33 AM
The email monster:
Our Fearless Leader has never mentioned it, but e-mail, the first net application to escape from the CS department, was involved in the first Internet fueled hysteria: Fleischmann-Pons announcement. Two chemists named Pons and Fleischmann announced that they had created cold fusion in a jar at room temperature. This wiki article doesn't mention it but email, just recently deployed around universities world wide fanned the flames of the hysteria. Just another example of how the Internet can make smart people look stupid.
Posted by: Linuxguru1968 at October 10, 2008 07:23 PM
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