Sven Hartge sven@svenhartge.de wrote:
Andrzej Adam Filip anfi@onet.eu wrote:
Stan Hoeppner stan@hardwarefreak.com wrote:
[...] The average size of an email worldwide today is less than 4KB, less than one typical filesystem block. [...]
Do not confuse "unix culture" of mostly plain text only email messages with "MS Junk" culture of overblown formatting with background images company logos as a few image files in every (internal) email.
I just did a rough analysis of the mail spool of my university (6.000 users, students and faculty staff, about 10 million mails) and the average mail size was at about 96KiB. Last year, this average was at 77KiB and in 2009 we were at 62KiB.
Mails the average size of 4KiB would then have been at a time when MIME was not yet invented, I believe. Somewhere in 1994.
Grüße, Sven.
I assume that in bigger organizations most mail stored in IMAP storage is internal. I also assume that size of typical mail in "unix/linux culture" and "MS culture" do differ. It may explain quite different experiences.
Could you elaborate about penetration by MS software/culture (especially about MS Exchange) in your university?
BTW I have seen a few (smaller) organizations with most (internal) mails below 4KB but remaining *huge* mails capable to very significantly influence average size. It makes me doubt about value of *bare* "average email size".
P.S. Anyway many organization are legally obliged to archive all emails.
-- [pl>en: Andrew] Andrzej Adam Filip : anfi@onet.eu Oh wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound. -- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke