After doing some manual restoration of emails from one user to another in DB Mail I suddenly found that the estimated usage was quite large. Approximately 17 exabytes (an exabyte is 1024 petabytes, which is 1024 terabytes, which is 1024 gigabytes).

This is what it said about my inbox:

Opening connection to database… Opening connection to authentication…Ok. Connected Info for user [rhys]User ID : 3 Username : rhys Client ID : 0 Max. mailboxsize: 0.00 MB Quotum used : 17592186044339.48 MB (inf%)

And what makes it even more interesting is this:

“It estimated that in 1999, the total of all human knowledge, music, images and words amounted to about 12 exabytes.” ((Source: http://www.cio.com/archiv e/092203/enriquez.html))

And the compression must be pretty good too, after all it is fitting on a volume only 200 gigabytes in size!

Unfortunately I’m guessing this is a bug in how it updates quotas. Pity, it would make up for UQ rejecting my request for access to the library (which I just found out you should be able to get for the first twelve months after you graduate).