Email Quotas Aren't Stupid

http://therubberboy.com/contortionist.php

I recently heard a project manager lamenting their “limited” email. How big is our limit? Well, I assume that for the normal peons in my company it’s about a Compact Disc's worth: 600MB. That’s almost as much as Gmail’s (current) 65GB allotment for their free account, right?!? It’s only 2 orders of magnitude difference, no big deal.

sigh

Clearly, storage isn’t THAT expensive, and it wouldn’t take much effort to make everyone's email have more room to breathe. Considering the cost for storage vs the cost of time and mental capacity for your workforce, it would seem like giving larger email quotas would be a no-brainer.
While this line of reasoning could be fleshed out on its own, I’m not going down that road. Too easy. I’ll go ahead and make the argument AGAINST larger quotas.
Software professionals love to joke that 640K should be enough for everybody, even if the whole thing is apocryphal. Working with systems having finite resources is part of the work that we do. That said, I cannot quite figure out why one’s work email would need to be so large. Could you imagine what the physical equivalent would look like? How many folders and stacks of paper would be needed to keep track of that much data IN EMAIL FORM? I think the larger problem is that you’re using email wrong.