
102KB ought to be enough for any email - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/05/102kb-ought-to-be-enough-for-any-email/
======
dual_basis
> We can argue about whether emails should be chonkie-bois or not. But they
> are. People want full styling, images, and fancy features - not just ASCII
> text and the occasional uuencoded attachment. That's the world we're in now.

Literally the only people effected by this are advertisers. Saying that people
want it to be fixed is just not true, almost everyone hates ads especially in
their email. If consumers were voting with their dollars on ways to improve
email I highly doubt that longer message sizes would be the result.

~~~
katzgrau
I work with a number of magazine publishers who have very strong newsletter
subscriber bases (city and regional magazines especially). Staff at magazines
take a lot of pride in layout, content, imagery, and attention to detail.

Saying that only advertisers care is untrue.

~~~
theamk
Sounds like email might not be the best medium for them. Every email client
sanitizes email a bit differently, and images are often omitted, so I cannot
imaging how anything but the most basic layouts can work.

~~~
DanHulton
Maybe you're underestimating the popularity of newsletters? People like
getting useful stuff in their inbox, and RSS really isn't a thing for non-
technical users. Getting regular "deliveries" of a newsletter/magazine is
ideal for a lot of users, even if it makes life hard for those "delivering".

As far as layouts, you can actually do a whole lot these days, depending on
how far back you're willing to go, in terms of compatibility. There are a
variety of tools designed to help you build a widely-compatible layout, and
then confirm that it looks correct in your target email clients. And it's
largely a "do once, then re-use" task, which is great.

------
ubermonkey
The use patterns of email in the HD readership do not mirror the world at
large, & are especially at odds with the corporate world. I mean, 20 years ago
I fought the "email should be plain text only!" battle, too, but it's time to
move on. We lost -- and, moreover, we were wrong.

Formatting in email is valuable.

Being able to include an image as part of the email (vs. just as an
attachment) is valuable.

I use both features many times every day.

Now, the issue in the article doesn't seem to come up for me because I don't
use Gmail at all, and most of my interlocutors don't, either. But that doesn't
change the fact that the behavior in question is bone stupid.

------
pferde
The thougts on this article should not be about necessity of big e-mail
messages, but rather on the heavy-handed and flat-out broken way Gmail
truncates the messages.

I mean, really, cutting right through HTML structure? That's just one
webbrowser bug away from a security vulnerability exploitable by a well-
crafted e-mail.

~~~
dTal
Surely it has no effect on security - if a truncated message triggers a bug,
then the sender can just... send that message to start with? No GMail
truncation required.

~~~
pferde
Not if the bug happens only when the truncation happens at the "right" place.
As far as we know, no other e-mail client truncates e-mails exactly like
Gmail.

~~~
dTal
Erm. I don't quite know how else to put this... what stops the malicious
sender from sending an email "pre-truncated"? Emails are plain text
underneath. Gmail's truncation contributes nothing that couldn't be
accomplished on the sender side anyway.

~~~
pferde
You are right, it would probably be a long shot.

I am basing this on some assumptions, such as that the truncation happens
after Gmail's content sanitizing has already happened, not before.

But even omitting the security aspect, such rude truncation is something I
would have expected on some low-budget webmail app done as a high-school
student's IT class project, not on a polished offering of a multi-billion
company.

~~~
jorangreef
No, you are quite right about the security risk. It creates ambiguity, and
ambiguity is just one step away from an exploit.

------
jcelerier
> The latest Android phones tend to have 6GB. A 32 times increase in a decade.
> Laptops have also leapt forwards in speed and memory. Sadly, no one on the
> Gmail team has noticed.

yet the average 350€ retail laptop still has 4gigs of RAM and a 1366*768
screen.

~~~
Crinus
And i hope this will be the case for a long time, as at least this give _some_
incentive for people to care a little about their software and sites -barely-
working on what would be a supercomputer 20 years ago while barely doing
anything more sophisticated than a midrange machine of that time.

~~~
merb
well 1366*768 is such a shitty format. So I hope they go away, pretty soon.

~~~
Crosseye_Jack
Depends on budget so also were in the world the device is brought.

768 panels are cheaper than 1080 panels so are often found in the lower end
devices.

While the gap between 768 and 1080 is slowly decreasing 768 is still the
dominate screen res in the worldwide stats [0].

But in Europe[1] and US[2] 1080 has overtaken 768, but 768 is still widely
used. We will be coding for 768 panels for a long time to come (esp as the
mobile vs desktop race seems to be tied for now[3]).

[0] - [http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/desktop/wo...](http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/desktop/worldwide)

[1] - [http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/desktop/eu...](http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/desktop/europe)

[2] - [http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/desktop/un...](http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
stats/desktop/united-states-of-america)

[3] - [http://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-
mobi...](http://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-
tablet)

~~~
Crinus
I should note that in my case i sought after the 768p panel (see my other
comment for reasons) and the price wasn't much of a concern. In fact i ignored
some cheaper 1080p monitors since i wanted a VA panel due to its better dark
colors than TN and IPS (which i've grown to dislike for its washed out
blacks).

------
michaelhoffman
I love this feature. It's made it easy several times for me to convince the
creators of overly-long newsletters to shorten things. These are newsletters
that I need to be subscribed to for work because they have things like
important policy changes that affect me but they often balloon with press
releases and excessive formatting.

As for the marketers that might pad things out so that an unsubscribe link
isn't visible, the Report Spam action works pretty well for finding a hidden
unsubscribe option, or blocking the sender if not.

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gjhr
Just to put that in perspective the snippet of Romeo and Juliet where it
truncates is a bit over halfway through the play.

~~~
rahuldottech
I... Am not sure how this is a useful perspective?

~~~
gjhr
I just noticed the author used Romeo and Juliet in the screenshot and was
curious how far through the play the truncation happens. It can be useful for
some to put sizes like this into another more familiar form, for example the
famous Bill Gates CD ROM photograph. Obviously this comparison only makes
sense if your email is in plain text, something which is often not the case.

------
theaccordance
My issue with this article is the narrative: That the truncation technique is
applied for the benefit of memory management on the device. What about network
throughput? Many of us have the privilege of blazing fast connections, both
wired & wireless, but the same cannot be said for other locales.

~~~
edent
That's true... to a point. There could be a "load more" button - rather than
taking users to a new mail view. There could be a "plain text" mode. There
could be a "turn off images" option (there is, but it is hidden well).

There are lots of ways of making things faster for people with slow/expensive
Internet connections _without_ degrading the experience for everyone else.

------
petercooper
_Worse still, marketing emails know that if they pad out their messages, they
can hide the unsubscribe link!_

I'm pretty sure no-one with any sense chooses to take advantage of this.
People just hit their Mark as Spam buttons which is basically like a death
sentence to people sending mass email. _(I send 450k+ legitimate, wanted,
double opt-in mails a week and spam reports are basically our kryptonite.)_

------
GuB-42
Looking at my work inbox, 80% of my email is under 100k, attachment included.
And in almost every case, the attachment (usually a document or screenshot) is
what causes it to go over the limit.

I have specifically chosen my work inbox because most of it is actual useful,
work-related conversations and not spam.

So yeah, 102k is fine, and I prefer to click on the occasional "View entire
message" rather than sacrifice performance because of a few bloated messages.

What the article complain about is that it is not enough for well-styled
newsletters and stuff like that. But I call it a feature, not a bug. These
mails are definitely not a priority, let them be truncated. One interesting
point is that it can hide the "unsubscribe" link. Google already addresses
that by providing an "unsubscribe" link right on top if you do things
correctly, and if you don't, then you are a spammer and you will get
blacklisted soon enough.

------
_bax
For emails, the asteroid to kill this dinosaur is still in orbit.

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willvarfar
What on earth is the body of an email like if it is more than 102KB? That's
about 30 sides of A4 normal text!

~~~
dagw
Add some inline images and a bunch of layout and you can easily hit that.

And yes I'm happy to argue about the evils of HTML in email and how I can't
read your email in pine, just like I was in 1997. And I'd still lose the
argument just like I did back then.

------
BlueTemplar
IMHO we need an e-mail client with Markdown support, HTML excluded.

~~~
bkq
Perhaps only a subset of Markdown.

~~~
jorangreef
What subset would you like? I work on email, a startup in private beta.

~~~
bkq
The same subset that is used by Discord, and Slack. So mostly blockquotes,
code, lists, bold, strikethroughs, and italics come to mind.

~~~
jorangreef
Thanks, that's the subset we have been wanting to add, along with links.
Markdown support in email clients has been a long time coming.

------
floor_
I wish I could send invoices from my office without having to split pdfs in to
chunks due to download size limits. It almost as ridiculous as having a fax
machine in 2019.

~~~
dijit
What if that file could be transparently uploaded to an s3/gcp bucket and the
URL placed in the email? Better or worse?

I believe the main reason that there is a 10mbit limit is that if it's much
higher then you have two consequences:

1) Mail in transit (and queue buffers) are going to be very heavy

2) Inbound mail being very large could cause you to exceed your storage limit
and hamper the deliverability.

Point 2 is mostly mitigated now with the advent of cheap as chips storage, but
point 1 is going to hurt mail relays.

~~~
gberger
I believe there is already some kind of integration between Gmail and Gdrive.
You can attach files from your Google Drive and what really gets sent is a
link.

~~~
pimlottc
This integration exists, but it’s a choice for the sender and it’s not
transparent for the receiver.

As a sender, when you select a file from Drive, it defaults to sending a link,
but you can change it to send as a normal attachment.

As a receiver, I believe you will see a Google Drive link, not a normal
attachment.

------
akerro
>People want full styling, images, and fancy features - not just ASCII text
and the occasional uuencoded attachment

Which people? I don't, my parents don't, and apparently, everyone who would
like to unsubscribe from ads also doesn't wont, as it's harder to find
unsubscribe link. Go away with your 5Mb emails, send me plaintext.

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BlueTemplar
Note the link to a 4 year old post by the same author complaining about
Google+ and saying that "It's time to start moving away from Google."...

(And I share the opinion, but it's impressive how HARD it can be to change
your habits.)

~~~
edent
My personal stuff has moved away from big G. But my work stuff hasn't.

------
johnnyhead
Just ditch gmail and send plain text email.

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wguaa
>This is annoying for people sending newsletters - even the mighty MailChimp
can do no more than offer some tips to shrink your latest newsletter.

I'm so sad that you can't send me more elaborate ads :'( :'(

