Email overhead - found about 25x basic email content

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Gordy7

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#269774 7-Apr-2020 16:01

I received a business email today....

Out of curiosity I looked at the email source (I use Thunderbird).

The basic email contained 10 lines of text and 11 lines of disclosure notice... a total of 2.2kB of data.

Viewing the email source I found there was a total of 52kB of data.

A quick look through the source showed things like:

Source and destination addresses

Mail paths

Authentication stuff.

Anti Spam stuff

Exchange stuff.

Basic email content.

Heaps of HTML configuration stuff

and more.

Gordy

My first ever AM radio network connection was with a 1MHz AM crystal(OA91) radio receiver.

sidefx

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#2456535 7-Apr-2020 16:18

Welcome to the interwebs. There's a reason for most of that stuff - and it pales in comparison to the data used for streaming, torrenting or pr0n... ;-)

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." | Octopus Energy | Sharesies
- Richard Feynman

SirHumphreyAppleby

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#2456536 7-Apr-2020 16:20

Plus HTML and plain text copies of most messages.

I receive weekly e-mails from a certain council-owned entity. The e-mail has a title in large font, and either side of the text they place the _same_ image. Natually, their mail client isn't smart enough to include it just once. They also love to include large images and even videos as attachments too. I had to increase my mail size limit from a very sane 1MB to an absurd 40MB IIRC (whatever GMail was using at the time).

With a 4/3 overhead of base64 encoding attachments, plus all the MIME headers, e-mails get very big very quickly. My daily offsite e-mail backup (for only three people) has grown by 4GB since January 1 2010.

EDIT: Clarified that it's the mail client, not the user that isn't smart enough.

richms

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#2456612 7-Apr-2020 18:10

4 gigs in 10 years sounds pretty close to nothing to me. I have 6 gmail accounts that I previously archived to, before I relented and paid them for the 1tb space (now 2tb I think) so I could stop archiving off to other places.

Richard rich.ms