[geeks] my head just went explodey

[Phil Brutsche]

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> The common "solution" is to put it in an attachment and send it out to
> 1000 people.  If it is 10MB, that's 10 gigs of data transferred and
> stored.

Many systems that scale to that number of users have a mechanism for 
storing a single instance of the message (aka single-instance message 
store).

That 10MB email can take up 10MB (or less, depending on the data and
whether or not the message store uses compression), regardless of
whether it was sent to 2 or 2000 people.

Typical corporate example: Exchange

Open source example: Cyrus IMAP

Theoretically anything that uses Maildirs (Dovecot, Courier-IMAP) could
support such a thing via hard links, but there would need to be an LDA
that supports creating the hard links.

Of course if your backup mechanism doesn't support hard links...

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at tux.obix.com