Capacity planning has often been viewed as more of an art than a science. Examples of failure abound, ranging from severe inadequacies leading to catastrophic system failures (like the California highway system and the San Francisco Bay Bridge) to grossly over-engineered systems that waste millions dollars. Internet email is no exception. In fact, recent years have seen a radical increase in Internet mail and most companies have had difficulty keeping up.

Most companies start out thinking of Internet email as a simple gateway service for a few users to communicate with a limited number of business partners and clients. This way of thinking stems from early email gateway services like MCI Mail, Compuserve Mail, SprintMail and AT&T Mail that provided business-to-business email communications through proprietary infrastructures at a relatively high cost compared to Internet email. These services can now be thought of as legacy services.

Within a few months of installing or upgrading Internet email facilities, many companies discover that they haven't invested enough in their email infrastructure and, as their systems become less reliable and begin to fail, they feel the pain of making do with inadequate resources. The resources are of course, hardware, software, network bandwidth, and the human resource represented by the available time of network administrators.

Top 10 planning issues for Internet mail
In the last few years, since approximately 1995, most companies have seen a dramatic and continuing increase in Internet email traffic. Planners have often been caught off guard by increases of 500% or 1000% inside of 24 months. There are many reasons for this but here are the top 10:

1. Changing role of SMTP
The role of SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) tends to change from a simple gateway service to an enterprise email hub linking business units, clients, and business partners. To understand a company's growth pattern, it's necessary to understand its business, particularly in terms of potential mergers and acquisitions, or other potential forms of rapid growth. You need to be able to map business developments to technology requirements (at least as much as possible without venturing into a fantasyland). For most companies, this means that business and technology planners need to work more closely together. As the economies become increasingly Internet-centric, this will become the norm rather than the exception.