A 5M-byte per message limit and a stern memo to employees have allowed FEC's system to regain its equilibrium, he says. Such steps have become the countermeasures of choice for e-mail managers, along with the use of increasingly popular filtering software. That New Jersey site was planning to upgrade its mail hub to a DEC Alpha 4000 on Saturday, but decided to shut down the crashed mail hub on Friday and start the Alpha upgrade early. Last year, Roche encountered a similar problem at its Palo Alto facility that prompted a hardware upgrade there. Foremost among the latter concern would be the potential for a sexual harassment lawsuit because some of these holiday missives feature stripping cartoon characters and anatomically enhanced snowmen.
Sheer volume remains the primary problem, however.
Most hard drives are about 3G, so every three hours I'm pulling off junk files the equivalent of your entire hard drive. John Kemp, vice president of IS at Lion Apparel in Dayton, Ohio, says he was surprised to learn how heavily the holiday cheer was pouring into and out of his shop. Lion's T-1 connections can keep up at this point, but Kemp remains worried about future traffic levels and the impact on storage space. As bad as the holiday headache has been this year, experts are concerned the challenge could prove greater come 1999. As not only the business world but the general public gets more comfortable with e-mail as a method of communications, increasing background noise will become a greater problem.