"Study?" I doubt the veracity of this "study"? (Score 1)

Did IBM conduct this study internally or in heterogeneous environments? Probably the former. I have 20 years of mail server administration experience (Sendmail, Postfix) that says otherwise. I've spent hours helping people with oversized inboxes who have either lost emails or there mail is bouncing because their mail spool is over 1 Gigabyte and their inbox file can't be appended. More hours spent addressing client-side or server-side performance problems because people don't care if they chew up 3 gigabytes of RAM on the server because they have a 1.2 GB inbox. The fools who publish this nonsense obviously didn't measure how quickly a user with a 50 megabyte inbox can check their new mail with POP or IMAP in comparison with the user with an 800 megabyte inbox. If you add up those seconds lost across users each time mail is checked one would find a different "answer" than the study creators decided they wanted. Email server performance problems in environments devoid of quotas demonstrate a willingness of users to exploit resources to the point of slowing down mail collection for everyone. Email server performance and thus MUA (Mail User Agent) performance is improved the smaller people keep their inbox (quotas or no quotas). A Macintosh OS X user using Spotlight can find email just as quickly regardless of what folder it's in. A UNIX user with a shell script can search hundreds of folders to identify a sough-after piece of email within minutes. I've been filing email with Pine since 1990, have used most email programs out there (Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, mail.app, Pine, Elm, etc.) and it's typically the people who *don't* file their email who come to me for help with problems, not those that do use folders. I find studies that encourage laziness and suggest users should consolidate email in their inbox to the point of negatively impacting server performance and the speed at which others can check their email to be unscientific if not profane. It's obvious this study was crafted with a very narrow set of parameters that ensured this specious outcome and should be ignored due to its lack of rigor as to what variables are actually involved in the time values impacting people checking and using email on both the client/server sides.