Dave,
Certainly it's your prerogative to set the policies as you see fit. I
would only suggest that instead of focusing on the logging load, that
you instead indicate more frequent checking causes more load on your
server's resources. I believe that under heavy load and many, many
users, the open connections, authentication and checks on the file
system can contribute to reducing a server's ability to handle the
load. The larger the number of users that you have, the more it makes
sense to set a policy. A few users doing this shouldn't make much of a
difference in any environment.
If you are looking for something that bothers the heck out of me, bring
up all of the clients with automated mailing scripts and bulk-mail
lists that have excessive numbers of bad addresses. I regularly get
bombed by this sort of thing, and it's never purposeful, though always
the result of an oversight. It takes a ton of resources to spam check
and then scan with two virus scanners 1,000 E-mails delivered as fast
as my server will accept them. I have one customer that insists on
sending themselves a copy of each of 350 E-mails that are sent to their
clients on a nightly basis, yet it is impossible for them to do
anything constructive with this daily volume of E-mail landing in an
account.
Matt
David Penrose wrote:
Matt ~
I'm glad you contributed your thoughts
regarding service. I was getting ready to send out a slightly modified
version of the "canned text." After reading your response, I thought
that composition of a good service message may result in appreciative
and considerate customers doing what is most helpful. Upon further
revision...
Dear
CUSTOMER ~
Our
mail-server logs show
that your email software checks for new email more frequently than every
five minutes. This could have an
impact on support and server
performance.
A log entry is made with every login (email
check). Frequent checks generate hundreds of extra log file lines each day. More log entries makes it more difficult to read the logs when we are trying to research a
problem.
Logging in so often also causes the
server to work a little extra. If everyone set there email to be checked every minute
of two, degradation in service
would be noticeable.
If frequent email checks are necessary for
the way you would like to manage business communication, then please
leave your settings as they are. However, if you feel you can accept a
modest up tick on your Automatic Send/Receive schedule, then we would
appreciate this being set to 5 minutes at a minimum. Scheduling your
automatic send/receive for 10 minutes or
more would be better yet.
Thank
you.
_________________
David
Penrose
Rod,
I wasn't quite joking, though I don't have a need to do this at the
present. If my servers were ever overburdened and I was seeking to
steal back some threads, I might move forward on this. It's my opinion
that I should strive to make E-mail as clean, reliable and real-time as
possible, and limiting people to no more than once every 5 minutes
would defeat that. Instead of enforcing this, I would rather just
simply communicate best practices and suggest that once every 5 minutes
is optimal. If I were a phone company, I wouldn't tell my subscribers
to not make phone calls more than once a minute, so as long as my
servers can keep up without issue, I'll allow the power users to do
this when they want to. Personally, I have my accounts set to once a
minute, and I find that to be useful for my needs. I may change my
tune entirely if I was to ever experience issues.
Matt
Rod Dorman wrote:
On Tuesday, February 21, 2006, 18:02:55, Matt wrote:
Write a log analyzer app and send them a message every time they check
less than your required minimum :)
You might have been joking but that's exactly what I do. I've forgotten
who I stole the original from but heres the canned text that I send 'em.
Sorry to pester you but in our logs I see that you logon to check your
e-mail more frequently than every five minutes which generates hundreds
of extra log file lines each day and makes it harder to read the logs
when we are trying to research a problem.
Logging in so often also causes the server to work a little harder than
it needs to degrading service for everyone else on the server. If
everyone did it, it would be pretty noticeable.
Even assuming you got an e-mail every minute you wouldn't have time to
read it and respond before the next check would be downloading more. It
would make our work easier and the server run much more efficiently if
you would please logon every 5 minutes at a minimum and 10 or more would
be way better yet.
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