Government plan is a load of junk

What an immensely practical idea from a government clearly in command of a peerless knowledge economy (Government data plans put CIOs on alert, 26 May).

A typical small mail server produces just 2GB or so every week, nearly all of which is bounced spam and other rubbish. So that’s around 100GB per year of mail logs alone. Now, let’s say there are 100,000 mail servers running in the UK. That comes to something like 1.0 x 10^16 bytes per year, aka 10 petabytes.

I would imagine that all the other stuff we generate puts another nought or two on that, giving a nice exabyte of worthless junk. How would they like us to lose that when we send our comms data across?

Les Hatton