At work, we use WebMarshal to filter internet access so the kiddywinks don’t access porn and games and MySpace and other Internet Evils‚Äö?묢. As well as blocking access, all page requests are logged and anything that hits a filter triggers an email to me.
Earlier this week, I’d stopped getting WebMarshal emails (although other emails were fine). Considering I get a fair few each day, I realised that something was wrong. Either that, or Die Kinderen had suddenly all gone good – which isn’t likely.
Today, I finally had a chance to figure out the problem. I use Outlook 2003 to pick up my emails from Exchange (actually, technically, Exchange pushes the emails to Outlook, but anyway), and in Outlook I have a rule set up that catches the WebMarshal emails as they arrive and moves them to a folder called WebMarshal. I soon realised that if I turned the rule off, new emails came through. Reactivate it, and nothing.
Eventually, I noticed this:
And all became clear.
For those Not in the Know, 65535 is one of those Computing Magic Numbers. Like 63, 255 or 1023. It’s an upper limit, imposed by the way computers like to work in binary and stuff. 65535 in binary, you see, is 1111111111111111, and that’s the limit for 16 bits. So now you know that Outlook’s folders have a 16 bit limit on the number of emails contained within. Knowledge is power!
The solution then was easy. Delete the lot, of course!
I’ll have to remember that. Didn’t realise that there was a limit to the number of emails in a folder!
Well, I assumed there would be, but I’d have expected it to be much, much higher!