<begin junkmail rant>

Last night I was going to put up the Christmas Tree and decorate for the
holiday season.  That is what I had planned on doing until I started
getting flooded with email "Seasons Greetings".  Instead I spent the
evening managing email.

I use an ISP which allows me both PPP and shell access.  During the day I
dial in (PPP) from the office, telnet to the server, and once logged on,
go into PINE so I can monitor "the list".  When I get home in the evening,
I dial in (PPP) and use Eudora 3.0 Pro to download the days mail from the
server.

This email account receives posts from the HP3000 list, personal email,
email forwarded from the (Navy) office email system (I'm away from their
office quite a bit and they don't have dial-in access to their email
system).

I also receive quite a bit of junk mail.  Most of it is small in size, but
lately there have been a lot of advertisements from companies that create
customized "electronic Christmas Cards" and companies showing their
graphic abilities through "Happy Holidays" graphics.  These advertisements
are generally EXEs or AVIs of 1.2Mb to 2.8Mb in size.  They take up a lot
of email server space and take forever to download.

This being the holiday season, a number of people have started passing
around holiday-related GIFs, JPGs, AVIs, and EXEs.  Some are
advertisements which have already filled my mailbox, others are the work
of their own graphics department, or their own personal effort. Most of
the GIFs and JPGs are in the 20Kb to 800Kb size range but the AVIs and
EXEs tend to be in the 1.2Mb to 2.8Mb range.  My ISP allows me 5Mb of
space total.  I have web pages so I generally have about 4Mb of space
available for email.  That doesn't leave much space for the receipt of
holiday AVIs and EXEs.

I have a good relationship with some of their techies so if I need to
download MPE/iX freeware or patches from Lotus, Corel, MicroSoft, etc., I
can "for a few days" use up to 20Mb without problems or additional
charges.  This allows me to ftp files to my shell account, then ftp them
from the shell account to my PC.  Unfortunately, large volumes of email
present some problems.

Yesterday, within about a 45 minute time window, I received about 7.72Mb
of email (several Christmas AVIs and EXEs).  This was on top of the 1.7Mb
of email I had received earlier in the day (mostly documents from the
office).  The result was a mess.  I was able to recover all the email, but
it took my ISP a couple of hours of effort and it took me about 4 hours to
copy email from folders to my inbox, download the inbox with Eudora,
delete the inbox, copy email from the folders to the inbox, ...

So, after having spent an evening managing email, I arrive at the office
this morning to find that people using the LAN email system have been busy
sending out MORE AVIs and EXEs to "ALL_LAN_USERS".  A quick total of the
attachments gave me warning that another emailbox failure was on its way.
I'm not sure how large the pipe from the office email system to the
internet is, but so far I've been able to keep this emailbox from crashing
by checking my email at least once every 5 minutes.

Needless to say, my feelings toward "electronic Christmas Cards" and other
large email attachments have changed a lot in the past few days.  What was
once "cute" is now "another one of those %#@&$#@%#$% things".  And I
wonder about all the disc space, processing power, and network throughput
being spent creating, storing, sending, and viewing these "Holiday
Greetings". Hasn't anyone got any shopping to do? work to do? real, paper
Christmas Cards to write?  Am I the only "lucky" person to be drowning in
holiday AVIs and EXEs?

Thank God It's Friday!

</end junkmail rant>

Happy Holidays!

John
--------------------------------------------------------------
John Korb                            email: [log in to unmask]
Innovative Software Solutions, Inc.

The thoughts, comments, and opinions expressed herein are mine
and do not reflect those of my employer(s), or anyone else.