[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[David Passmore]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 11:34:57AM -0500, Brian Hechinger wrote:

> i think we are all leaving out a small detail here.  anyone running a reasonable
> sized mail server has a reasonable sized internet connection.  UE4500 at work
> sitting behind multiple T3 lines for example.  but what about that guy with the
> 56k dialup line?  compression would do him no end of good, and would cause
> almost no impact on any other mail server.  56k is just too slow to cause any
> sort of serious load on anyone trying to compress/decompress that stream.  i
> think bill pointed it out, this is a choice between cpu and bandwidth.

Bandwidth is cheap compared to the processing power it would take to
compress/decompress the several hundred gigabytes a day that run through the
largest ISPs' mail servers. E-mail is a free service, a loss-leader as you
will, and while I haven't crunched real numbers on what it would save in
bandwidth, the back of a napkin tells me it just wouldn't be worth it. Text
e-mail messages are usually very small, and the larger attachments just
don't compress very well or are already compressed.

David