[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[Sridhar the POWERful]

On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Greg A. Woods 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.
>
> Huh?  I used to get nearly as much e-mail back when I had a 28.8kbps PPP
> link (with very high latency) as I do today.  My PPP link was idle much
> of the time (except when I was doing a lot of FTP, www browsing or
> such).  You should work out the number of bytes of plain raw
> un-compressed SMTP you push through a low-latency 56kbps link before you
> go thinking you need to compress any of it!
>
> Sure if you have to run a huge mailing list on the end of a
> low-bandwidth pipe then you might want compression, but if you're doing
> that then something else is wrong with your scenario!  ;-)

Why not rob latency to increase available bandwidth for mail?  Latency
isn't really important for mail.

Peace...  Sridhar