The Scenerio

A teacher opens their email program to send a 2 mb lesson file to a school Principal.  The Principal receives the email, approves it and then forwards it to the webmaster to post on the website.  The webmaster may reply back to that email with the attachment buried down within the thread of that email.

The Issue

1. The teachers email with attachment automatically is placed in the “sent” folder once it is sent to the Principal. Which takes up 2mb of space on the email server.
2. It arrives in the Principal’s inbox taking up and additional 2mb of space
3. The Principal forwards it to the webmaster.  This results in the email being placed in the Principal’s “sent” box (another 2mb) and then as it arrives in the webmaster’s inbox, it takes an additional 2mb of space
4. The webmaster might reply needing more details and then that reply goes to her “sent” box.  This is another 2 mb of space.  We are up to 10 mb of space for a 2 mb file.
5. Though the emails that are in the inbox get deleted, they are then move to the “deleted” box.  The “sent” box remains the same and now the deleted box contains 2 mb for every “inbox” message that was deleted.
6. TCUSD also has a “journalling” archive server that archives every piece of mail that passes in and out of TCUSD since we are dealing with student data.  This doubles the amount of mb listed above.

As you can see, a small 2mb file can take up over 20mb of email server space.  Most files passed are much larger that 2mb.  The webmaster prefers images at full sized and they can be over 300mb.  Some lesson files using powerpoint can be comparable in size.  It’s easy to understand the compounding effect and that the email server can crash.

We actually had an email crash August 31, 2020 due to this space issue, so in an effort to save our email system and the resources devoted to it, we need another way to pass documents back and forth between teacher -> Principal -> Webmaster. The way we want to start accomplishing this is through Google Drive.