100MB of Email

Posted Tue Jan 28, 2003 in

I’ve always had an active email life. (In fact, Wife just remarked about that, prompting the idea for this entry. :) I’ve been doing email since 1984, when I got my first computer. It all started with bulletin board systems and grew when I went to work for the USGS.

For awhile, I ran a BBS, Brainstorm BBS. It was a QuickBBS system, which required me, the sysop, to design and code all of the menus used by the system. I had a well-configured system and spent a week designing (actually, that was the redesign) the menu system, much like the coding of a weblog. I had about twenty regular users and some long-distance folks would log in to download technically-oriented filesl, which was the purpose of the system.

I was part of FidoNet at the time (later called Fight-O-Net ;) and ran a few of their mailing lists that I like to read. But I coudlnt afford to have many mailing lists as I had only a 2400bps modem (the best at the time was the U.S. Robotics Courier 9600bps modems, and they cost about $600). So I paid about $25/month in long-distance bills to keep my mailing lists.

Recently I moved all of my mixed personal and professional email from my home desktop to my notebook. There was over 90MB of mail and attachments in my folder system. I just checked my office email and there’s 110MB of mail and attachments there.

That’s a lot of email.