I have read advice you have offered us readers in the past, especially regarding the management of Internet access in offices. Do you have any advice on how a small office can control the amount of storage capacity used by staff for saving incoming e-mail? We use Eudora Mail Server and the Eudora client version in our office and incoming e-mail takes up huge amounts of space on our computer hard disks. This has to be controlled.
RUSSEL POON Hong Kong There are quite a few things you can do. First, you can set up the mail server not to store incoming mail. You will find that even if you allow users to keep mail on the server, they will do and also store it on their local clients, thus using up hard-disk space on both ends.
Hard-disk space may be cheaper these days, but if employees begin to think of it as an unending resource, it can be quite expensive for companies to keep providing it as such. Limitations on usage are essential, especially on the server end.
On the client end, a user eventually will run out of disk space if regular maintenance is not done, and only the addition of a new hard disk will resolve the situation. On the server end, on a mail server or a file server, limits can be set on storage each user is allocated, and this can be exceeded only with management approval. Users are forced to maintain their server storage area as they would the hard disks on their clients.
Another approach used by some companies is to give users as much server disk space as they want to use, but charge them a fee per megabyte of space used above a certain limit (say, $10 per megabyte over one gigabyte).
In cases where this strategy is used, the fee per megabyte not only takes into account the basic cost of the hard-disk space, but also the time MIS personnel might have to spend running the system. Therefore, the cost per megabyte is often more than the street price for the same.
