How many of you reading have a gmail account?  OK, maybe it would be easier to ask how many of you don't have a gmail account?  Pretty much what I thought.  Most everyone I talk to has a gmail account (at least one) and a good number of them use this exclusively. Do I have a gmail account? :-$ Yes, I am actually slightly embarrassed to say I do.

I have been using Google for finding information since it was first available.  I absolutely love having that kind of information at my fingertips.  But I really think this comes at a cost.  Now I can have a Google email account, a Google calendar, a Google home page and a slew of other offerings.  Now whenever I search for something I get a small pit in my stomach as I see the targeted ads on the right hand side of my browser window get closer and closer to accurate.  The first time I noticed that the content of these ads changed if I was logged into my gmail account, I created a script on my machine that ran in the background and alerted me every ten minutes to the fact that I didn't log out.

Now comes the era of the corporate level Google hosted solutions.  Yeow!  This is the reason I don't get supermarket and hardware store discount cards.  At some level, this presents an obvious conflict.  How is it that I can be sooooo eager to love the information at my fingertips and yet cringe at the amount of data they are accumulating?  It could be that I can just bend the story to fit my mold, but I see a very defined line between reading a post in a forum about SMTP servers that I find linked to in Google and getting bombarded with ads for washer and dryer combos because I had an email conversation with my mother about getting a new washing machine!!!

Google's offerings work, the plain and short of it.  Their calendar is what most people are looking for in a calendar, their storage restrictions are almost not there, they are always online, the provide hooks into their stuff so others can develop plug-ins and such.  Working in the email industry, I see all of these things as having a positive spin.  This has certainly raised the bar for what the end user expects in their web experience.  This certainly drives me and I would hope others (especially in the hosting industry) to produce a product that makes someone go "Yes!  That is just what I was looking for" when it comes to a web based offering.  This is the positive spin, the negative side of this seems obvious to me......  er.....  WHY DO THEY WANT ALL OF THIS DATA?

Money?  Power? Both? Maybe they just want to offer a quality service to better the well being of all humans?  Only they really know and we can only speculate.  You can read many many online (as well as print) articles about Google and the government being in bed together.  I'm not so sure I buy this.  What concerns me more is that they are in direct competition with some of those three letter governmental agencies.  In my opinion, this should plainly scare the hell out of all of us.........

I am going to continue to use Google for finding data online and occasionally for testing some email setups, but I am going to continue to be cautious about the information I give out.  There is certainly something larger going on here.  I urge the rest of  you to do the same.

Thanks for listening...

jb

Initially tonight I was planning to write a bit about the need to improve email services in terms of scalability, redundancy, and performance given today's demanding environment and increasing email volume. As I was thinking about how to approach such a topic, it became clear to me after a moment of cat inspired meditation, that this was a pretty broad topic to try to cover in one post. (In case you were wondering, cat inspired meditation can happen when the cat has wandered across one's power strip button. At this time, one may find herself on her hands and knees, under the desk, thinking about life and small fur hats.)

So I started thinking about email volume. After returning from under the desk, I ran across many websites predicting that email volume will only be increasing more in the next few years. Every day more and more businesses depend on email communication. More and more people receive electronic billing statements, use email based support, get email confirmations for online purchases, and so on. However, what really struck me was how many websites are predicting that beyond this, a big problem in the future of email will have to do with increasing attachment sizes.

More and more people and businesses want to use email to send each other videos, large presentations, PDF manuals, software demos, and so on. Some websites predict that soon people may well expect to be able to send 200MB attachments, or possibly larger, via email. I have started to see this more and more lately myself. At @Mail, we regularly have requests from customers for ways to tune the system so that they can send larger attachments than the default of 16MB. Also, many of the companies that I have consulted for have requested large attachment support.

This is a huge nightmare from an administrative point of view for many reasons. Here are just a few, but the list goes on and on (really, I could rant about this for hours.)

1. Email is really not designed to be effective as a large file transportation system. It was not built for this, and no one who writes SMTP servers is interested in changing this, for many good reasons.
2. Sending a large attachment, especially to a lot of people, generates a huge amount of load on an internal network.
3. Often, a mail server will time-out before an attachment of a very large size can be sent, either at the sending, or at the receiving end.
4. Most mail servers out there have limits to attachment sizes for incoming messages, so even if you allow and tune your systems so that users can send large attachments, the mail may be rejected.
5. The sender may inconvenience a receiving party who is on a limited speed connection trying to download their email, especially if that person is paying on a per bandwidth basis.
6. If the mail server accepts really large attachments, it becomes massively vulnerable to DOS attacks.

Despite all of this, many businesses still really want to have some way to email around large files, and do not want to bother with setting up an FTP site, or some other sort of secure file sharing tool. You can explain to people why this is a bad idea until you are blue in the face, but it does not change the fact that from a user-friendly point of view, people would really like the process of sending a file to be as simple as putting it in an email message.

A few companies are now starting to provide appliance solutions that sound like a nice way to strike a compromise that will keep end users happy, and avoid all of the problems of sending huge email attachments. These appliances essentially grab large attachments from emails after the user has sent them, and replace them with a secure download link, so that the email going out is just a link that the receiver can click on to download the attachment. All this happens transparently to the sending users, and makes it really easy for everyone involved. Accellion and Intradyn are examples of companies selling such appliances, but I am sure there are others.

I did some more searching, but so far have not found any open source software solutions that someone could put to use to accomplish this task yet. It would not be that difficult of a thing to do with a SMTP proxy and some exciting plugins, or possibly even with a simple script that messages get sent to when they are over the attachment limit set in the MTA.

Hopefully I will have the time to look into this further myself, as I think this would be a great solution for many of my clients. And if anyone reading has already done this, it would be great to hear from you.

My cat and I would be very grateful.

Leah