Recommended Method of Use of SMBC Email Services

A recent problem with the Webmail service highlights issues with sending and receiving emails.

The advice below should help to prevent such problems from occuring in the future. Users are asked to be vigilant with email sizes and to ask their contacts to follow this guidance if they receive large emails sent as circulars.

Schools and their external email contacts should note the following advice that applies to all Sandwell School email services.

• Delivery and storage of email costs money. Emails have to be delivered to their recipient and also need to be stored. This involves the use of bandwidth to transfer the data to the server, and disk space to store the emails on.

• We have noticed that from time to time, partners, suppliers and other contacts may send emails containing large attachments to groups of users. These have to be transferred and stored individually, i.e. each recipient will store their own copy of the contents.

• This means that, if a 20Mb attachment is sent to 200 users, it will take up 100 x 10Mb of disk space, i.e. approx 4Gb of space.

• Such emails should be considered to be circulars rather than emails.

• Users will legitimately try to store this email, (they may want to refer to it later), and so inboxes grow in size, and the amount of available disk is reduced.

• A more cost effective way of providing these attachments is to store it on a web server, and just send a link to the file as an email. Such emails can be much smaller, typically 2-3kb, so in total, 600k of data is sent to the same 200 users. A saving of 3.999 Gb.

• A number of organisations already adopt this method, probably because some email systems limit the space available to users and so the content does not arrive. We feel that limiting disk space (by setting quotas) is counter productive as it prevents legitimate "single copy" emails, where a large file is sent to a single recipient. We currently do not want to prevent such emails from being delivered.

• Partners are therefore requested to limit the size of emails to "as small as possible", and to post attachments that they send to multiple users on suitable web space. This should not restrict the use of html code in emails under normal circumstances, so emails could still look "pretty".

• Sandwell MBC staff should contact the Strategy and Communications Unit who will advise on how to arrange for the attachment to be placed on an SMBC webserver.