[geeks] Gmail's attraction

[Andrew Weiss]

On Sep 6, 2004, at 1:24 PM, Joost van de Griek wrote:

> On 2004-09-06 18:13, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
>> My main thing against email attachments is when it is used wholesale,
>> and for large files.  This is especially bad when it happens inside a
>> company, since there is no reason for it at all then.
>
> It is especially bad when $person sends an email with a multi-megabyte 
> Word
> monstrosity (say, "latest version of project specs") to everyone in a
> project team. Assuming that most people do not throw away their 
> (groupware)
> email anytime soon, that means you may end up with multiple copies of 
> said
> humongous document on your *mail* server.
>
> Multiply this by the number of revisions of the document, and by the 
> number
> of projects going on, and it becomes clear that sending an email 
> saying,
> "Hi, team! I've put a new revision of the specs in the projects share!"
> would be quite a bit more efficient.
>
There is some help for that problem in MS Exchange.  When Exchange 
recognizes a file as being identical in an attachment to another one, 
it implements single instance store... which means there is only one 
copy of each file.  I think SQL Server 2000 does this a bit too.

Andrew