Email / Inbox Speed Problems

[sleinart]

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
sleinart@...
919-832-5553

[sleinart]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean Leinart [mailto:sleinart@...]
> Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
> To: TJ Russ
> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
> sleinart@...
> 919-832-5553
>

DOH!!
 
List, please disregard the erroneous CC: post to the list.

Peace,

Sean

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

Sean Leinart wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Sean Leinart [mailto:sleinart@...]
>> Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>> To: TJ Russ
>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>> sleinart@...
>> 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

[jay plesset]

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.

jay

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

> Sean Leinart wrote:
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Sean Leinart [mailto:sleinart@...] Sent: Friday,
>>> October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>> To: TJ Russ
>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>> sleinart@...
>>> 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

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

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:sleinart@...] Sent: Friday,
>>>> October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>>> To: TJ Russ
>>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>>> sleinart@...
>>>> 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

[jay plesset]

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:sleinart@...] Sent: Friday,
>>>>> October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>>>> To: TJ Russ
>>>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>>>> sleinart@...
>>>>> 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
>

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:sleinart@...] Sent: Friday,
>>>>>> October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>>>>> To: TJ Russ
>>>>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>>>>> sleinart@...
>>>>>> 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
>>

[John Hardin]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

Great post, up until this:

> 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.

Don't go there, Ted. This isn't the appropriate forum for that.

--
  John Hardin KA7OHZ                    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
  jhardin@...    FALaholic #11174     pgpk -a jhardin@...
  key: 0xB8732E79 -- 2D8C 34F4 6411 F507 136C  AF76 D822 E6E6 B873 2E79
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
   An entitlement beneficiary is a person or special interest group
   who didn't earn your money, but demands the right to take your
   money because they *want* it.    -- John McKay, _The Welfare State:
                                        No Mercy for the Middle Class_
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  14 days since President Obama won the Nobel "Not George W. Bush" prize

[jay plesset]

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. . .

>
> 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. . .

>
> 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.

>
> 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.

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:sleinart@...] Sent:
>>>>>>> Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>>>>>> To: TJ Russ
>>>>>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>>>>>> sleinart@...
>>>>>>> 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
>>>
>

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

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)

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:sleinart@...] Sent:
>>>>>>>> Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>>>>>>> To: TJ Russ
>>>>>>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>>>>>>> sleinart@...
>>>>>>>> 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
>>>>
>>

[LuKreme]

On 23-Oct-2009, at 16:41, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 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.


It's amazing to me you have ANY Mac users as customers.

Tell you what, the guys down the hall from me run a Mac-oriented  
hosting service, MacHighway.com. Refer your Mac users there. They will  
not be treated as if they are 'dumb as a stamp'.

--
'It's time to-'
'Prod buttock, sir?' said Carrot, hurriedly.
'Close,' said Vimes, taking a deep drag and blowing out a smoke ring,  
'but no cigar.' --Feet of Clay

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

LuKreme wrote:

> On 23-Oct-2009, at 16:41, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> 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.
>
>
> It's amazing to me you have ANY Mac users as customers.
>
> Tell you what, the guys down the hall from me run a Mac-oriented hosting
> service, MacHighway.com. Refer your Mac users there. They will not be
> treated as if they are 'dumb as a stamp'.
>

stump, not stamp

No, I'll tell you exactly how they will be treated.  They will not be
treated as though they are ignorant and need education.  They will be
treated as though they are so smart that they don't need any education
whatsoever, and that if they ever have to fix anything with their
mystical Mac, that they have to pay someone to do it for them.

In short, they will be kept ignorant because that's the way the Mac
retailers and Apple keep them hooked.

It's like the Mac user I talked to the other day who was positive
that the only way to get more hard disk space was to buy a hard
drive from Apple, that the regular hard drives on sale at the store
wouldn't work.  I corrected that when I told her that the Mac
sitting at my right hand here that I do support with had a crashed
hard disk in it when I got it and I pulled a hard disk out of a
PC that I was scrapping out to fix it.  She was amazed that you
could do that.

Sure, a lot more people ignorant of computers buy Macs.  Are you
going to argue that?  The entire sales strategy of Apple is to
cater to these people and KEEP THEM IGNORANT because that way they
can sell them computers and peripherals that cost 6 times more.
And design their products so that figuring out how to take them
apart takes hours so that their average customer can't do it.

I'll never forget the first time I opened an iMac  (Blueberry as
I recall) to replace a crapped-out dvd drive.  I had 2 iMacs, see,
one with a fried video board, the other with a drive that someone
had jammed and bent by sticking a screwdriver in it.  I figured
I'd remove the drive from the system with the crapped video board
before I tossed it out.  It took me 2 hours of staring at it,
probing gently, and imagining how they had hidden access to
everything before I finally found all the hidden screws and got
it apart.  And I only succeeded in the end because I wasn't the
first guy to take it apart, and the prior guy who took it apart
had obviously NOT figured out where all the screws were because
some of the screw mounts were fractured and the screws torn out.

Of course, once it was apart all their secrets were exposed and
it was easy to see what they had done, so the second one came
apart quite easily.

I haven't repaired a minimac yet, but I read that Apple designed
it with breakaway pieces that you HAVE to fracture to get it
apart - so that only Apple repair places who can order replacements
for the breakaways can reassemble them so they look nice.  Apple
learned that trick from the automakers who do that with body panel
fasteners - but you can buy the replacement one-use fasteners from
any auto part store.  Not so with Apple.

Where else can you pay $30 for a USB mouse that retails for $5 from
Fry's (or other retailer) than a Mac store?

Who else than Apple produces a cellular phone that costs $100 for
a new battery and you have to hand your phone over to a retailer to
install it?  Ever other cell phone on the market has a battery cover
and you open the cover, take out the battery, and put in a new battery
that costs $30 from the store, or $10 off Ebay?

Yet, you open up a new Mac and what's inside?  A PC motherboard and
processor, that's what there is!!!  You can even boot OSX on a PC
motherboard if you patch out the checks that Apple put in it to try to
prevent the educated guys out there from doing it.

And don't even get me started about software.  Every piece of software
worth a piss that's running on my PPC Tiger box here I either downloaded
and compiled on it, or downloaded precompiled binaries, and none of it
cost me a cent.  There's a universe of Open Source out there that runs
on OSX with minimal effort.

Yet, Apple's response to the Open Source community is APSL 2.0 which
is incompatible with GPL.  And do you think that anyone in a Mac store
knows anything about free Open Source Software, much less APSL?  Or
would tell them to use, say, NeoOffice instead of selling them
MS Office for the Mac if they had a chance?  Hah!

Your amazed WE have Mac customers?!?  At least WE try to EDUCATE them
so they aren't stuck with Apple sticking it to their wallets.  I'm
amazed that ANY Mac-specific retailer, much less APPLE, has ANY Mac
customers.

Ted

[Alex-325]

Hi,

I really hate to respond to this because it's so off-topic (how long
did it take you to write that email, anyway?), but you're soooo
missing the point that I just can't let it go, and it's slow on a late
Friday night.

> Yet, you open up a new Mac and what's inside?  A PC motherboard and
> processor, that's what there is!!!  You can even boot OSX on a PC

That's not the point. Haven't you ever bought a bottled water, or
spoken with someone that has, because it tastes better? It's all in
the marketing. Apple caters to people that just don't care that it's a
PC inside.

> Yet, Apple's response to the Open Source community is APSL 2.0 which
> is incompatible with GPL.  And do you think that anyone in a Mac store

That's a different issue. There's no business model for corporations
like Adobe building open source apps for the PC, let alone the Mac
where the userbase is even smaller.

> Your amazed WE have Mac customers?!?  At least WE try to EDUCATE them
> so they aren't stuck with Apple sticking it to their wallets.  I'm
> amazed that ANY Mac-specific retailer, much less APPLE, has ANY Mac
> customers.

You had mentioned someone jammed a screwdriver into the computer and
broke it, and you really think they care about going to Fry's to buy a
replacement hard disk? They just don't care. They want it to just
work. Who cares that the mouse is $30? They buy them for the
convenience, the looks, the infamous support for multimedia, and the
ease-of-use. They buy them because it's a single point of contact.
They buy them because someone can make the choice for them, and they
can get on with doing things other than worry about the details of the
computer and just start using it.

Best,
Alex

[LuKreme]

On 23-Oct-2009, at 22:16, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> Sure, a lot more people ignorant of computers buy Macs.  Are you
> going to argue that?


Yep, because I see ignorance is pretty even across all computer users.  
PC users are just as stupid, and often more stupid than any Mac user.

Back in the 90's I worked in tech support. I had calls from people who  
were angry their windows system was "calling them invalids" when they  
typed the wrong password and got an "invalid login" error message. I  
had a windows user who complained that their coffee holder had broken  
and spilled coffee on their keyboard. This one took a while to figure  
out, but the user had been using their CD drive as a retraceable  
coffee cup holder. I had windows users from corporate accounts send a  
XEROX of a floppy disk when they were told to send us a copy of the  
disk. I had people who sent 20+ page faxes over and over and over  
again. When asked why they explained that the fax simply wouldn't go  
through because they still had the original. I could go on for DAYS.

Stupidity and cluelessness is not confined to any particular class of  
people, it's truly universal.

As Albert Einstein said, "There are only two things that are infinite,  
the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."


--
Today the road all runners come/Shoulder high we bring you home.
        And set you at your threshold down/Townsman of a stiller
        town.

[LuKreme]

On 23-Oct-2009, at 22:56, MySQL Student wrote:
> Who cares that the mouse is $30? They buy them for the
> convenience, the looks, the infamous support for multimedia, and the
> ease-of-use. They buy them because it's a single point of contact.
> They buy them because someone can make the choice for them, and they
> can get on with doing things other than worry about the details of the
> computer and just start using it.


They also buy them because they are BETTER.  I am not a mouse user,  
never have been, never will be. I use the keyboard 95% of the time and  
the rest of the time I use a Trackman Marble. That said, the Apple  
"Mighty" mouse is the single best mouse I've ever used, right up there  
with the old Sun optical mice which required the special glass  
mousepad, and better than plenty of $60-120 mice I've seen Windows  
users buying.

My MacPro cost me a little over $2,000 for 2 dual core Xeon  
processors. I've bumped the RAM up to 10GB and I have 7TB of storage.  
I STILL can't get a comparable machine much cheaper than I what I  
bought this machine for almost 4 years ago (though I could buy a  
replacement MacPro that is considerably better for a little more), and  
at the time I bought it the closest competition to it was a high-end  
Dell that cost more than $500 more, couldn't take 32GB of RAM  
(couldn't take more than 8GB in fact, but that didn't matter since  
Windows could only use 3GB max) and didn't have Firewire 800.

And other than a run of bad crashes due to a faulty memory module, the  
machine has been rock solid for almost 4 years. I use it to access all  
my freeBSD servers, and I use it to capture and encode video, to play  
my music, play games, read email, watch movies and TV, and I do these  
things all at the same time.

On the other hand, I have a Windows machine that needs constant  
maintenance, rigorous anti-virus protection, firewalling, and periodic  
scans for malware. And if I try to do too many things at once, like  
say watch video AND copy files, it tends to throw-up. It works fine  
for the very limited tasks I use it for (pumping video to the  
projector) but it is fragile, and every 6 months to a year I find I  
need to reformat the drive and reinstall XP just to get the machine  
back to a somewhat stable environment and get its performance up to  
where it should be. If I let the kids install ANY games on it, it goes  
to shit very quickly.

My cousin has a 2 year old Dell that he was complaining was running  
slowly. He thought it was his dial-up, but then he noticed it was slow  
even when he wasn't online (Yes, DIAL-UP.) I went over and saw that  
his Norton was up-to-date, but the malware scan took 6 hours and  
multiple reboots to run and ended up with a total count in the  
THOUSANDS. This is Windows, and most windows users do not run malware  
scanners and many do not keep their anti-virus software up-to-date.

As for linux, linux has a long way to go before it is a realistic  
option for most people. I've tried several times to use ubuntu instead  
of windows XP for my HTPC, but the simple fact is that Ubuntu does a  
far worse job of pushing video than Windows XP does and files that are  
perfectly playable with VLC in XP are not playable in VLC in Ubuntu.  
Other linux distress perform even worse as desktop machines.

--
I DO NOT HAVE POWER OF ATTORNEY OVER FIRST GRADERS
        Bart chalkboard Ep. 2F19

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

MySQL Student wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I really hate to respond to this because it's so off-topic (how long
> did it take you to write that email, anyway?),

Not long, I type 50 wpm

> but you're soooo
> missing the point that I just can't let it go, and it's slow on a late
> Friday night.
>

Yep, and I'm already regretting the time I've spent on this but as
you say it's slow, and everyone loves a digression now and then.

>> Yet, you open up a new Mac and what's inside?  A PC motherboard and
>> processor, that's what there is!!!  You can even boot OSX on a PC
>
> That's not the point. Haven't you ever bought a bottled water,

Never.  I swear on a stack of bibles I've never bought bottled
water.  I've been given it at various company functions, etc. and I
can't taste the difference between it and tap water.  However, I
live in PDX which should explain why.  If I lived in CA I almost
certainly would NOT drink unfiltered tapwater.

> or
> spoken with someone that has, because it tastes better? It's all in
> the marketing.

First you say it tastes better then you say it's all in the marketing.
which is it?

> Apple caters to people that just don't care that it's a
> PC inside.
>

Exactly my point.  Ignorant people.

>> Yet, Apple's response to the Open Source community is APSL 2.0 which
>> is incompatible with GPL.  And do you think that anyone in a Mac store
>
> That's a different issue. There's no business model for corporations
> like Adobe building open source apps for the PC, let alone the Mac
> where the userbase is even smaller.
>
>> Your amazed WE have Mac customers?!?  At least WE try to EDUCATE them
>> so they aren't stuck with Apple sticking it to their wallets.  I'm
>> amazed that ANY Mac-specific retailer, much less APPLE, has ANY Mac
>> customers.
>
> You had mentioned someone jammed a screwdriver into the computer and
> broke it, and you really think they care about going to Fry's to buy a
> replacement hard disk?

Different users, separated by many years.  I would hazard a guess the
first user that broke the mac wouldn't have.  The second did, though.

> They just don't care. They want it to just
> work. Who cares that the mouse is $30?

Heh.  OK so they are catering to people who spend money unwisely because
they have too much of it.  I guess that the Obama administration is
probably on the right track when they are cutting salaries of all the
top bankers, then. ;-)

I thought irresponsible spending went out of style about a year ago,
before the economy crashed.  It certainly seems to have done so around
here.  Your pretty lucky if they are still doing it where you are,
hopefully they are tipping some of it into your pocket.

> They buy them for the
> convenience, the looks, the infamous support for multimedia,

Why can't I play windows media files on a Mac out of the box?  Think of
how many websites use that.  It's much vaunted but it's not perfect.

looks don't push data.

> and the
> ease-of-use. They buy them because it's a single point of contact.
> They buy them because someone can make the choice for them, and they
> can get on with doing things other than worry about the details of the
> computer and just start using it.
>

Except that they simply can't "just start using it" unless they know
what they are doing.  That's the big lie of Apple.

Macs, or PCs or Suns or whatever are utterly NON-intuitive to people who
have never touched a computer before.  No matter what platform you
choose you still need training, and most people don't have enough
incentive to self-train.  (those that do, are running the show)

I see a lot of neophyte computer users told to buy Macs, then they go do
that and turn it on and are clueless.  Then they call us up and want a
complete crash course in how to surf the web using their Mac.  Sorry,
but I don't buy that line of rubbish about Macs being usable by
ignorant people.

We get the same thing from neophyte Windows users too, but there's
definitely less neophyte Windows users out there calling us, probably
because people think that proficiency with Windows is expected for
their job/whatever, and are embarrassed when they don't have it, so they
go get training rather than try to scam free training from out support
people.  The Mac users by contract aren't embarrassed in the least that
they don't know what the hell a web browser is, when they are expecting
to be able to get on the Internet.

The one thing I will give Apple credit for though is that they have more
consistency in the user interfaces between versions.  Windows versions
change wildly with every new release, OSX also changes, but not as much.

Ted

[Ted Mittelstaedt-2]

LuKreme wrote:

> On 23-Oct-2009, at 22:16, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> Sure, a lot more people ignorant of computers buy Macs.  Are you
>> going to argue that?
>
>
> Yep, because I see ignorance is pretty even across all computer users.
> PC users are just as stupid, and often more stupid than any Mac user.
>
> Back in the 90's I worked in tech support. I had calls from people who
> were angry their windows system was "calling them invalids" when they
> typed the wrong password and got an "invalid login" error message.

That's a new one, cool!

> I had
> a windows user who complained that their coffee holder had broken and
> spilled coffee on their keyboard. This one took a while to figure out,
> but the user had been using their CD drive as a retraceable coffee cup
> holder. I had windows users from corporate accounts send a XEROX of a
> floppy disk when they were told to send us a copy of the disk. I had
> people who sent 20+ page faxes over and over and over again. When asked
> why they explained that the fax simply wouldn't go through because they
> still had the original. I could go on for DAYS.
>

Those three I've heard of before.

> Stupidity and cluelessness is not confined to any particular class of
> people, it's truly universal.
>

Not for everyone.  Some people actually care about being educated, they
really want to know how things work, they really want to know the
truth of things, and not be misled by a pile of baloney.

When given a choice I will always choose to educate the user, rather
than give 'em a shovel of dogcrap because it makes them go away faster.

I have found that some people don't like this, and in fact will resent
it mightily.  Those customers of ours like this that represent a small
amount of revenue I have no mercy on - I would prefer they go away if
they don't like being told what's what.  Ultimately, keeping them costs
us more in support than we ever would make from them.  Those customers
of ours that are large amounts of revenue (fortunately not many) I
make sure to assign someone else to deal with them since I know enough
now to know that I can't talk to them.

I've also found that life is much more pleasant when I avoid the
ignoramuses who are proud of being ignorant and I reach out towards
the people who want to be educated.

YMMV

> As Albert Einstein said, "There are only two things that are infinite,
> the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
>

Variants on that line have appeared throughout history.  It's a shame we
haven't evolved beyond that.

Ted

[R-Elists]

 

>
>
> It's amazing to me you have ANY Mac users as customers.
>
> Tell you what, the guys down the hall from me run a
> Mac-oriented hosting service, MacHighway.com. Refer your Mac
> users there. They will not be treated as if they are 'dumb as
> a stamp'.
>

LuKreme!!!

please fly my family over to France to meet you and some good meals soon!

i see you made a typo.... yet, stamp, stump... same difference...

and what about this....

God forbid you are a Republican Mac customer that knows thier family roots
back to the Ice Age !

;-)

eh?

 - rh

[jay plesset]

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:sleinart@...] Sent:
>>>>>>>>> Friday, October 23, 2009 2:04 PM
>>>>>>>>> To: TJ Russ
>>>>>>>>> Cc: allison.ayscue@...; 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
>>>>>>>>> sleinart@...
>>>>>>>>> 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
>>>>>
>>>
>

[John Hardin]

On Sat, 24 Oct 2009, Jay Plesset wrote:

(~20k snipped)

Jay, can you prune your replies, please?

Thanks.

--
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