Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Jay Plesset wrote:
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
What is the point of a quota system that does not limit the
received mail? And if it does limit it then we get irate calls from
people complaining that sally sue sent them a message and got it
returned. Of course, sally sue never reads the error message
and tells our user that their e-mail box is too large - or if
she did, then irate user thinks it's our problem.
Um, well, that's not exactly how it works.
System messages and "guranteed delivery" messages always get through.
Messages that will take a user over quota are held for a configurable
"grace" period, and the user is warned that they are over quota at a
configurable repeat rate. Messages are returned to the sender after
a configurable hold period. there are plenty of knobs for you to
turn. . .
I can understand that, and in a corporate environment where you
have more control over the userbase (and the users are much more
inclined to listen to you, after all it's not their money on the line)
I am sure it would work well. Of course, if I was using a
-standards- based method of handling mail in such an environment
(ie: NOT MS Exchange) then I wouldn't be using POP3 in the first
place, I'd be using IMAP and I'd also setup a set of shared
e-mail folders accessible from the IMAP client. I'd also probably
run some scripts that warned me when people were letting their
inbox get too large, so I could go train them in how to drag the
mail messages they want to save into private or shared folders
on the server. But, that's my style - other admins might go out
and buy software to do this. Ultimately it works the same way.
This discussion really illustrates the disconnect between people who
write e-mail systems for a living and what ISP's need. While I've
not looked at the Sun comm suite your talking about, I'm sure it's
not that much different from many other commercial e-mail systems
I've been pitched over the years from people wanting to make my
life easier as an ISP admin (in exchange for some money, of course)
Just to be clear, the software I'm offering is designed not to "replace
Exchange", but for ISP's or large corp accounts. One of the customers
I'm assigned to support has 100 "store" systems, each with 500,000
mailboxes and typically sees 30,000 simultaneous imap connections.
We often see systems with a million mailboxes.
You like webmail? Our webmail interface also talks to our Calendar
Server, our IM server, and should shortly include gateways into other IM
systems. It's all pretty open, based on standard protocols, and no,
there isn't a gui admin interface. Maybe later. The MTA has been
around for 25 years, previously called, "PMDF".
Yes, we'd like you to license it, and pay for support. You can download
and use at no cost. . .
jay
The problem though is when I've drilled into them, I've always found
issues like this. Those systems are written first as competitors to
Exchange, and make a boatload of assumptions about the users, and
the admin's skill level. Usually they assume the users are smarter
and the admins are dumber. That's about right for the corporate
networks I've admined. But ISPs don't survive unless the admin is
a lot smarter - because the users in general are a lot dumber.
Oh, there's exceptions - but most of the time it's customers who
work in office environments and come home and want the same level of
support they get at the office. Those people are in a minority.
The majority of customers quite obviously don't understand very much,
and with a surprising number of them they don't even understand the
accepted nomenclature.
If I had a nickel for every time I've told a user "OK now open your
web browser" and gotten back "what's a web browser" I'd be a rich
man. I've learned to refer to web browsers with phrases like
"go to google" or "click on the Internet". This is the level of
skill we deal with regularly. After all, it's not the new-technology
embracers who are calling in for ISP support. It's the people
who were left behind years ago, who are only on the Internet because
the rest of their family won't spend the time to communicate with
them unless they are on facebook or e-mail. At least once a week
I and the other admins get someone who we just shake our head over
and wonder why in the world this person is even wasting their money
and time with a computer at all - they are like the old grandmother
who never drives on the highway and never drives faster than 45Mph
who owns a Lamborghini. It's really a sad thing, to be honest.
Not to mention the user thinks their inbox is -on their mac-
not on our mailserver, since of course they are entirely
unaware that their applemail has the setting flipped that
leaves a copy of the message on the mailserver.
Sending them notifications is worthless since they don't know what
they are, they don't know how to shut them off, and 3/4 of
the time they think they are spam anyway.
The whole point of this is customer management. Your average mac
user is as dumb as a stump. As long as things work they assume
everything is hunky-dory. If things stop working they NEVER
assume it's their Mac that's the problem because Steve Jobs
told them Mac's are infallible and they worship the ground he
walks on. And of course, if they stop working they stop working
at the worst time for them, (late at night on Friday) because of
the laws of Mr. Murphy. So by the time they get ahold of us
they are hopping mad, they assume it's our problem, and the Pope
himself could tell them that it's their own stupid fault and
they wouldn't believe him.
Well, it's true that most users don't know much, but it's my
experience that many admins don't know much more. . .
That is true and I've seen it myself, but mostly in the corporate
arena. I'd say easily 3/4 of the admins in corporate America would
fail miserably if they went to work for an ISP and half of those
would go back to corporate work after a few months and never look
at working an ISP again, even if they were so poor they were living
out of paper bags.
Naturally, if things start getting slow they ALSO
automatically assume it's our problem - but they generally
are not emotional to the point that they won't listen. So
they call in, expecting to "inform" us about something we
are doing wrong - whereupon we have to tell them that their
Mac that they believe is infallible is really fallible because
Apple's programmers are idiots and select retarded defaults.
That's a terrible blow to their world view, and it's often about
the most that they can digest.
It's very similar to what I tell admins when they get "winmail.dat"
attachments they can't read. Yep, Exchange isn't very compliant.
That's the understatement of the year.
But the key here is that when they get off the call they are
fixed (because their Applemail is now correctly deleting the
mail that it downloads) and that they DON'T believe that it
was "our problem", and they have actually learned something
about how e-mail works.
I can also see your next argument - if we inform them in advance
that their mail client isn't deleting the mail it downloads
that we might avoid this. The problem is that first, we don't
know in advance if they are running a large mailbox because they
are dumb-as-post mac users, oblivious to the world, or if they
are running a large mailbox because they are running IMAP or
some such that doesn't have that problem with the mailserver.
If they do know what they are doing, and we call them, we look
like idiots, and it's annoying to them, or worse they get the
impression we want them to go away. Second, if they are
dumb-as-post users, they automatically assume that if we tell them
to change a setting in their Applemail, that it's because our
mailserver is screwed up - because, after all Macs are infallible,
and everything that Apple does must be the One True Way to setup a
computer.
It's really better in the long run to make them come to us, not
for us to go to them. If they come to us at least they are
acknowledging that there's a problem. Remember, problems with
computers are very frightening to people who are ignorant about
computers. Think about it, you don't know squat about your car's
transmission - so if a mechanic tells you your transmission has
a problem, your going to be scared to death it's going to cost you
thousands. Your average Mac user will go into denial when they
have a problem with their Mac - they will refuse to believe for
the longest time that there's a problem even when it's obvious
there's a problem to a blind monkey. They have to believe there's
a problem before they are even willing to be educated in how
to fix the problem.
As I said, this is customer management. Just keep in mind that
when your dealing with the general public, the more ignorant the
person you work with, the more likely they are to assume they are
right, and you are wrong. For us to win at the game we must
educate the users, and the most ignorant of the users will only
open their minds for knowledge for a very short time, before it
snaps closed like a steel trap, and they will never believe
there's a problem unless they see it for themselves.
After all, just think of your average conservative Republican's
reaction to Global Warming. It's not something they can see and
their brains are (apparently) incapable of imagination so they cannot
imagine that Global Warming is real, that's why they make silly
arguments like "global warming must not be happening because
we are having a pretty cold winter" It's the same principle in
operation here.
Well, it's the devil you know vs the one you don't. I was offereing
a solution that doesn't slow down. If you don't think it would help
you, then you don't have to look at it.
And what I was saying is that your initial post is only looking at
one small thing of an entire system.
Have you ever seen a manual typewriter? Did you know that the
qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be ridiculously
inefficient? Better keyboard layouts exist that allow people to
type at 100's of wpm without much practice or training, because
they move the most commonly used keys to the strongest fingers.
qwerty was setup the way it was because the designers of the
typewriter first tried doing it correctly - and then discovered
typists were jamming the mechanicals of the typewriters because
they were typing so fast.
This is an example of design that improved one small thing and
caused a lot of problem side effects.
The same issues exist in e-mail systems. Users by their nature do
a lot of very bad things to mail systems - the most common one out
there is treating the e-mail server like a Lotus Notes document
management system. Microsoft discovered this with Exchange - they
had a lot of complaints from users that searching for and managing
e-mail attachments was difficult under Outlook. The proper thing
to do would have been to tell those customers that they needed to
buy a document management system. Instead, MS improved the document
management capabilities in Outlook. Then, a few years later customers
found that once they exceeded 4GB of space in their Outlook inbox,
every mail message and document attachment in the inbox would
become corrupted. MS's answer was to fix Exchange to allow 64GB
inboxes - but of course, that only works if the inbox on Outlook
is on the Exchange server. If they are using Outlook with an ISPs
POP3 server, they get screwed due to the side-effect of this limit -
and lots of them run into this because Outlook's document management
is so easy to use.
I realize this is a complex answer and probably doesn't neatly
fit in a sales literature sound bite. In summary, sure, changing
software would speed one thing up, would "fix" one thing. I don't
argue this. But it is going to have undesirable side effects that
represent
breakages of other things. And those breakages then have other fixes,
which have yet more side effects, and so on and so on. Software
development houses love this stuff - because they can just write
code additions forever that fix more and more things, and they are
always in business - but at the same time, the software gets more and
more bloated with features until it becomes so complex to use that
nobody can use it anymore.
As was stated by Scotty in Star Trek III, The Search for Spock:
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up
the drain"
That quote was made over 25 years ago. It's amazing how many people
still don't get it.
Ted
jay
Ted
Jay Plesset wrote:
Many of my users use the various quota settings in Messaging
Server. You can set quotas on message number and/or mailbox size.
Notifications are sent to the user, even if they're over quota. . .
You can set quota individually, by "class of service", or globally.
Yes, it'll run on the same hardware you're running now. On Redhat
4 or 5, or Solaris.
jay
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Jay Plesset wrote:
Geez, unless your users are into the millions of messages, maybe
you need a more scalable mail server. My day job is support of
the Sun comms suite. I only get these when there are litterally
tens of millions of messages in an inbox.
Where we generally get these problems is when users are running
MacOS X
and using the included free Apple Mail as a POP3 client, because one
of the DEFAULTS of that client is to leave a copy of the mail message
on the server. The typical scenario is that we get one of these
users
who runs it this way for a couple months, then one day their relative
starts e-mailing them 50MB pictures of their latest vacation, and
once
their e-mail box exceeds 800MB in size, popper (qpopper) starts
getting
really slow in downloading the message ID list and their client
starts
running like a dog.
There's probably many ways I could fix it, from replacing qpopper to
going to faster disks or more powerful hardware, or running a nightly
script that squawks about the bad citizens, but I frankly don't
feel compelled to allocate all of our POP3 users a gigabyte of
disk space for their mailbox, and if did fix it then I'd have to
setup
quotas on /var/mail
Doing it this way penalizes only the users who engage in the
objectionable behavior, and it penalizes them in such a way that
it doesn't cause them to lose mail, or cause the server to reject
incoming mail messages to them, or causes mail they have to be
truncated. And
it also doesn't do it in a way that is sudden - the user just starts
noticing things getting slower and slower and slower over time - so
they have plenty of time to contact us at their leisure.
I suppose that one of these days the author of qpopper will rewrite
the search logic in the qpopper program to fix this and then I'll
have
to find some other way to gently enforce this.
Ted
jay
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Sean Leinart wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Leinart [mailto:slein...@fscarolina.com] Sent:
Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
To: TJ Russ
Cc: allison.ays...@lonesource.com; Spamassassin Mailing List
Subject: Email / Inbox Speed Problems
Hi TJ,
Looking over your Inbox situation, you suffer from the same
problem as most here do. You have too much email stored on the
server. Can you give me a rundown of the folders that can be
eliminated in your Inbox, we can archive them off then delete
them from your folders that are online, this will help a great
deal.
Thank you,
Sean Leinart
Network Systems Engineer
First Service Carolina Inc.
Raleigh, North Carolina
United States
slein...@fscarolina.com
919-832-5553
DOH!!
List, please disregard the erroneous CC: post to the list.
I had to look twice since it was the identical problem to what
we deal with every week around here.
Ted
