A Better Title

Dear Diary,

First, let me tell you that I’m not against forwarded e-mails. Here I’m talking about those jokes, meaningful poems or nice pictures that you forward to your friends. However, it would help if you had used some common sense when forwarding such e-mails. The experience I just had would not happen if such common sense had been used.

Look at this picture:

All names have been blurred out to protect the people involved. Now take a look at the right-hand-side size column. You’ll notice that the biggest e-mails in the mailbox are forwarded e-mails. They happily eat up my Yahoo! Mail storage quota, which currently stands at 6 MB. Just to illustrate an e-mail with a lack of common sense, take a look at the highlighted one, which is 182 KB in size.

Before I continue, I have to explain how forwarding an e-mail works. When you forward a message, your e-mail program (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or whatever you’re using) wraps the entire existing e-mail with your own details, like this:

Original e-mail:

When you forward an e-mail:

So after a while, this may become:

Get what I mean? Ok, now I shall continue.

So what happens in Outlook is that when a message is ‘wrapped’ in another message, the program will open these messages in ‘layers’. So in the last example, Outlook will open the message from Someone, and Outlook will indicate that it contains another message from Someone else. Then you open this, and see that it contains a message from Yet someone else. Continue until you get to the actual message.

Oh, and did I tell you that every message will be opened in its own window? So this is what I ended up after opening the highlighted e-mail I talked about above and reaching the actual message:

If you counted properly, you’ll see that I had to open 25 different ‘layers’ before I got to the actual message. If you don’t know how I got the numbers, take a look at the number of opened Microsoft Outlook windows and substract the main Outlook window and the ‘Enter Network Password’ window (I was disconnected when I took the snapshot).

So the last layer shows the actual message, which is as follows:

See the attachments contained in this layer? So the actual message is only 1 KB in size. The bulk of the size of the e-mail came from those useless wrappers containing gazillions of e-mail addresses which I doubt anybody but spammers care about. A 1 KB e-mail has bloomed into a (relatively) huge 182 KB one.

So the moral of the story today is: When you forward an e-mail to another person and you notice that there are thousands of useless information, make sure you trim these out before you do. It’s very useful for everyone: The recipients are not clogged with a huge e-mail, a lot of the Internet’s bandwidth is saved, and you don’t have to deal with the e-mail’s recipient complaining to you about your actions.

In case you’re wondering, this is what the above-mentioned e-mail contained:

Not very happy,

bcc

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2004 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.