Time for a limit on storage limits

We're constantly being told that storage capacity is cheaper than ever, so why do companies still insist on imposing size limits on e-mail inboxes?

There are many reasons why you might want to throw a BlackBerry across the room, but automated nag messages from the IT department certainly rates one of the highest.

A mate of mine was recently bemoaning the fact that the e-mail set-up at his workplace automatically starts sending out "your mailbox is nearly full" warnings when the e-mail file goes above 60MB.

This in itself seems pretty insane, given that his overall limit is 100MB. An equal hassle is that the same message keeps being sent at regular intervals of 10 minutes or so, thus making the problem worse by adding extra excessive messages to the inbox.

Leaving aside the questionable justification of having that particular notification schedule, it's a bit of a mystery why any company would want to impose a 100MB limit, given that you can purchase even the USB version of that amount of space for the equivalent of a couple of hours of white-collar labour.

Quite frankly, 100MB is nowhere near enough. If you're exchanging and revising PowerPoint files, for instance, you could easily consume that with a handful of exchanges.

OK, I know you could use some of Office's fancy file-sharing features here, but we're dealing in the real world, not Redmond's fantasy business vision. In practice, people still fling files around using e-mail.

After all, when consumer e-mail providers are falling over themselves to provide gigabytes of free space, being told at work that you can have a fraction of that amount is galling to say the least.

Modern corporations aren't renowned for their caring attitude towards workers, so perhaps the best threat remains a legal one.

With e-mail now constituting a core business record, imposing stupidly small limits might lead to the destruction of important business information that subsequently pops up in some unpleasant and unexpected lawsuit. Seems like a big risk relative to purchasing some more hard drive space.