Re: Messages from the ietf list for the week ending Sun Aug 16 14:36:38 2020

[tom petch <[e-mail]>]

On 16/08/2020 19:58, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 2:37 PM John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>    1 |   3014 | Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]>
>
> Is it HTML formatting, bottom quoting, or email header explosion (or some
> combination of the above) that leads the smallest individual email on the
> list this past week to be 3014 bytes in length? (I didn't bother to average
> the email lengths from multi-posters).
>
> For what it's worth, I'm trying to send this without formatting and with
> minimal quoting to see how small I can get it. Now I have to try to refrain
> from posting anything else on the list this week ... :-)

Andrew,

e-mail header explosion by the ESP in part, HTML in part.

The plain text announcement of an RFC on the announce list is 2kbyte to 
3kbyte.  In 2012, that was up to 6kbyte by the time I received it.  In 
2013 that jumped to 9kbyte and in 2015 to 12kbyte and in 2016 to 
16kbyte.  In 2019, it went down to 11kbyte.  The difference is mostly in 
the x- headers with X-Microsoft-Antispam-Message-Info
being enormous.

HTML varies a lot.  Your message reached me as 13423byte; removing HTML 
takes that down to 12193byte while removing the X- headers cuts that to 
6207byte.  At the MSA stage it was probably 1270byte if it were plain 
text only.

BUT this message is a very conservative use of HTML.  Some MUA like to 
include the Microsoft style sheet which can expand a message from 
10kbyte to over 100kbyte - yes, one hundred. As a rule of thumb I would 
say that a multipart alternative with HTML is about twice the size of a 
plain text message.

I select the MUA option of plain text and think that the security of the 
IETF system, and the usability of web mail, would be improved if that 
were mandatory:-)

HTH

Tom Petch










>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>