Here are some raw numbers I've come up with while looking through my e-mail archives:
- Average size of a teacher's e-mail to a single class: 17kb
- Average size of a teacher's e-mail to all of his/her classes: 58kb
- Average size of a faculty e-mail to an entire grade: 287kb
- Average size of a faculty e-mail to everyone in the school: 682kb
- Average size of an IT department e-mail to everyone in the school: 7kb
- Total size of all e-mails received beginning July 1st, 2007: 34354kb
It's unfortunate that the clear majority of the school faculty hasn't got a clue how to use a
FirstClass e-mail system properly. The reason for the discrepency between the 7kb IT e-mail and the 682kb faculty e-mail is simple: the IT department, for all of their shortcomings, at least understands that FirstClass allows the user to bulk-address messages instead of requiring to stuff 1700 e-mail addresses onto the To: line. The result is quite nasty: as one can expect between five and ten of these gargantuan e-mails per week, the messages have a tendency to pile up.
Often, that isn't the end of it. Messages are frequently composed by staff members with attachments ranging from 20k to a whopping two megs in the case of teachers that aren't familiar with the way scanners work. Instead of using HTML or plain text, messages are often composed in the bizarre format used internally by FirstClass. This often leads to teachers' inline images being converted to strings such as [Image: Attachment1.bmp] and so forth.
For those following the last few posts, I completely finished Twilight Princess around 11AM yesterday. My attention has now shifted to finishing
Ura Zelda, which is a considerably more difficult remake of its 1998 N64 counterpart,
Ocarina of Time. If I end up finishing that before the end of Christmas break, the probability of which is likely, I'll
go back in time.