Monday, April 30, 2007

And Just How Busy a Lad Is Your Ned?


No, that's not a PhotoShop trick. That's a real screencap of my work mail account.

I've been watching that number rise since I got this Mac, early in 2006. When it hit 9,000 or so (last week, I think), I became curious to see if Apple Mail was actually capable of displaying a five-digit number in that slot.

God, the amount of pure junk in that account! I think that of those 10,000 emails, probably less than 1,000 are anything that actually meant anything important to my work life -- and I've actually answered maybe 500.) The rest is a monumental pile of sheer, time-wasting crap. Cc's I don't need to be cc'd on. Cancellations of meetings I'd never intended to go to in the first place. ListServs for products I don't touch. Schedules for projects I'll never be involved in -- just to "keep me in the loop." Announcements from cow-orkers I've never even met, who live in California, but find it important to let me know they'll be "working from home" today, tomorrow, and probably Wednesday too, if the contractors finish on time.

Ah, well. Now my curiosity is piqued: Can Apple Mail display a six-figure number?

On to 100,000!

7 comments:

Roger D. Parish said...

Umm, and you are keeping all of this unneeded crap e-mail because...?

Anonymous said...

The thing that always slays me is when someone who does not have the first, most basic, Square-0.9 concept of email etiquette, sends out an urban myth or a chain letter to everyone in our organization, which numbers well into the four figures...

...and then several people, who are all rightly irritated by this behavior, reply back to all and quote the entire original letter.

Anonymous said...

I *hate* when I'm copied on emails that have nothing to do with me just so I'm *in the loop.*

Stupid cow-workers.

I like that...word? Phrase? What is it?

Bobby Lightfoot said...

Back in th' old days when I administered QuickMail for a company (O.K. SAIC- I'm paying it off one karmic tragedy at a time) I used to suspend people's accounts for up to a week for chain crap. 3 days for stupid jokes, 5 days for kute kitties, 7 days for Clinton/Whitewater conspiracy horseshit.

Think of what that much garbage mail would do to a IIsi back in '94.

Yes, they did make me stop.

Neddie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Neddie said...

Umm, and you are keeping all of this unneeded crap e-mail because...?

My biographer is prolly gonna want them.

GB: It's cow-orkers. Back in the antediluvian days of USENET, I was very fond of the company at alt.folklore.urban. (Google my real name in News, and you'll find some of my posts.) Part of the culture at that newsgroup was always to spell it with the misplaced hyphen -- probably because some outraged poster from before my time had insisted some urban legend or other had really happened to a "cow-orker" of his. The habit's stuck.

I used to be email pals with Barbara Mikkelson of snopes.com, back before she married Snopes himself.

I've always been partial to orking cows -- I'm a dab hand at it.

PZ Myers said...

Yes, Mail can display over 100,000 emails. It will be intolerably slow, however -- you'll click on the mail folder, and you might as well go fix coffee, drink it, wait a while to absorb the caffeine, and piss out the water ... about that time, it will display your mail messages for you.

I got to that point earlier this year, and that was even with automated sorting and ruthless destruction of junk mail. It wasn't good. I had to dig into ~/library/mail/ and rip out folders to get it down to a functional size again.