[Coco] [OT - Sort of?] Sizes of emails sent to this alias

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

John,

This is a mailing list that goes through several stages, all of which are
maintained in the full header.

In the header, there's the list information itself (name, sub, unsub, archive,
post, help); the message ID (thread, language, subject, etc.), the original
path of user to ISP (which can travel through several servers, as yours does),
from there to list (servers, time, date, etc.), spam and virus checks (with
status flags), and the route back out from the list to the user, which in my
case also invokes spam and virus checks (the same ones, as it's my server).
Time and date are embedded at many steps as well. You can read all of this by
viewing the full header. I use Squirrel Mail, which has a 'view full header'
option.

On the other hand, you'll notice that the messages themselves are all
converted to plaintext (reducing size significantly for those who post in
richtext/html) and almost all attachments are stripped (ditto).

Dennis


On Wed, November 11, 2015 4:46 pm, John Guin wrote:
> I realize that modern machines have much more memory than legacy machines,
> but please bear with me.
>
> I was looking at the size of the last few emails sent to this alias and the
> average size was just over 16K.  This means that my original Coco could not
> even open most of these mails.  Heh.
>
> But I also noticed that every mail I receive to this list is strictly larger
> than or equal to 13K in size.  That seems a bit excessive since almost all
> the content in the mail is text, and not very much text at that.
>
> I looked at the emails and it seems a constant amount of header information
> is being added as the mail items are being routed around.  In a typical
> message, this amounts to 4K or so.
>
> The text of the average of the last 25 mails I received is <1K.
>
> So there is still 8K of email overhead being added somewhere.  Any idea
> where that may be coming in?  And before this question needs an answer, do
> other folks using various email clients see about the same size mail items?