@MichaelTBacon I dunno, hey. Long email threads containing lots of HTML and graphical signatures on every message in the thread can run into many many megabytes, and every time you reply, the new message is bigger than the last, because nobody actually deletes older messages in the thread.

HTML email in general is a bugbear of mine, and HTML signatures with embedded graphics is an even bigger one. They make an email which would otherwise be less than a kilobyte take up 600kb or more.

On the other hand, I take your point. It's a drop in the ocean (no pun intended) if your aim is to save water. :-)

@GrahamDowns A lot of graphical signatures are done with A HREF tags though and aren't stored as part of the email.

Around 10 years ago the average message size on a very large email instance I help run was around 50-60k because so many emails are very small (<10k). Yes, attachments bump it up, but a ton of messages are pretty tiny.

@MichaelTBacon To be honest, I would still consider 10k too large to justify the substance of most messages (attachments excepted, of course). I would say 2k should be more than enough for a particularly long one, with anything over 5k being exceedingly rare.

The problem is, well over 50% of the "text" that goes into an email these days is html which is never actually seen by a user. It's a waste.

And regarding those graphical signatures, the email itself might contain just an <img> and <href> tag (both of which take up unnecessary space, as mentioned above), the image itself is still a couple hundred k, and once you've downloaded it, it's embedded in the message in your email client for offline viewing, so that email, which should really have been no more than 2k (maybe even 500 bytes, if it's just a "Hey, how are you?" type of thing) is now consuming 600k on your hard drive.

Why? Why would you do such a thing?

HTML emails and embedded images are a huge part of why 14.4kbps Internet is no longer fast enough. And if it weren't for those, we'd be using a lot less energy.

But, getting back to the original thread, just to re-iterate, I completely take your point about e-mail being hardly worth mentioning in the face of AI.