7 ms·
102KB ought to be enough for any email
- jcelerier 7y ago> 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 7y agoAnd 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 7y agowell 1366*768 is such a shitty format. So I hope they go away, pretty soon.
- Crosseye_Jack 7y agoDepends 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/worldwide http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/wo... [1] - http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/europe http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/eu... [2] - http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/united-states-of-america http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/un... [3] - http://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet http://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobi...
- Crinus 7y agoI 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).
- Crinus 7y agoI use it for my desktop computer (and in fact i sought for it), so i hope it doesn't as i've mainly seen advantages with almost no disadvantages. It allows for fast framerate in games with low end-ish hardware without the blurriness of upscaling, higher compatibility with older games, crisp graphics in GUI applications (...that follow system settings wrt font rendering - i have antialiasing disabled and use fonts designed to look good without it) and personally i like the pixels being visible. The main issue i have is with sites making assumptions about my DPI (making everything gigantic) and window width (i do not run the browser maximized so often sites get a ~1000px or less width and think i'm using a mobile phone or tablet so they switch to that). Now, TBH i'm mostly talking about the DPI/pixel density/pixel count here. If you are talking about the aspect ratio, then yes it is a bit weird, but it isn't like the world absolutely has to have 16:9 or nothing (and TBH i never really had an issue with it myself outside of a few rare cases where some program used 1360x768 instead of 1366x768 but that was a very minor issue).
- _bax 7y agoFor emails, the asteroid to kill this dinosaur is still in orbit.
- dual_basis 7y ago> 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.
- Arnt 7y agoThe most recent message in my inbox contains a friendly greeting, two sentences telling me to do the usual thing with the attachment, a signature and an attachment. The signature uses a font and a logo and stuff, because some brand consultant cared about that. To me, that message seems to be the archetypal email of 2019, and the styled signature is no more optional than the friendly greeting. Sigh.
- 4aceb14e 7y ago> Literally the only people effected by this are advertisers. Exactly. If your are writing newsletters with multiple megabytes per issue you deserve a special kind of hell.
- edent 7y agoI read several long-form newsletters which have this problem. You can argue that they ought to be blogs - but people like semi-private social networking. If you click on the links in my blog post, you'll see normal people complaining about this. They're not all advertisers.
- katzgrau 7y agoI 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.
- deleted 7y ago
- pferde 7y agoThe 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 7y agoSurely 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 7y agoNot 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 7y agoErm. 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 7y agoYou 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 7y ago
- floor_ 7y agoI 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.
- nostalgk 7y agoHow big are your invoices? I generate PDFs both from code and HTML, and in general even the largest ones aren't above 500kb. Usually around 100-250 pages.
- floor_ 7y agoThe invoice includes scanned bills of lading we get mailed in from our drivers. An invoice size can range from around 2.5mb to 12mb+. An we usually try to batch multiple invoice per email for their convenience. Things like 9 pin printer and colored copy paper bloat the sizes even with max size reduction enabled.
- nostalgk 7y agoMakes sense. It would be cool if email providers could just convert an attachment into a link so it can still be sent over email for those large files.
- dhosek 7y agoApple's mail program does this. If the receiver of the email is also using Apple mail, the link aspect is transparent. I've only had to use it a few times, but it was wonderfully helpful.
- rini17 7y agoExcuse me, but invoices should NEVER be multi-megabyte PDFs. Fix your PDF generator.
- floor_ 7y ago
- johnnyhead 7y agoJust ditch gmail and send plain text email.
- michaelhoffman 7y agoI 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.
- willvarfar 7y agoWhat 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 7y agoAdd 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.
- nathan_long 7y agoYes. If an email is bigger than 102KB (excluding attachments), there's a 99% that I don't want it.
- petercooper 7y agoView source on any "designed" emails you get. You will see a LOT of <table> related code. You can easily end up with a 10:1 ratio of HTML to content with the more elaborate emails.
- zlynx 7y agoNot only table styling, as another person said. Duplicate CSS also. I've done view source on some newsletters. On at least one there is a top-level CSS style block with all of the rules. Then, who knows why, there's a duplicate of every single rule placed inline to the table row TR tags. That one also has zero line breaks and exceeds 1,000 characters per line (an SMTP violation). Unlike some other newsletters that bounce off my mail server, this one's sending script "fixes" it by arbitrarily adding a line break at 998 characters no matter what word is at that position. I've sent them links to the RFC and notes about the broken rendering but they just don't care.
- gjhr 7y agoJust to put that in perspective the snippet of Romeo and Juliet where it truncates is a bit over halfway through the play.
- rahuldottech 7y agoI... Am not sure how this is a useful perspective?
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoIt's a long play.
- ubermonkey 7y agoIt's not. It's an example specifically picked to make the limit sound reasonable, because it concerns only the text of the play itself. What fattens email is layout information and inline images, which the example completely ignores.
- gjhr 7y agoI 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.
- wguaa 7y ago>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 :'( :'(
- BlueTemplar 7y agoNote 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 7y agoMy personal stuff has moved away from big G. But my work stuff hasn't.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoIMHO we need an e-mail client with Markdown support, HTML excluded.
- bkq 7y agoPerhaps only a subset of Markdown.
- jorangreef 7y agoWhat subset would you like? I work on email, a startup in private beta.
- bkq 7y agoThe same subset that is used by Discord, and Slack. So mostly blockquotes, code, lists, bold, strikethroughs, and italics come to mind.
- jorangreef 7y agoThanks, that's the subset we have been wanting to add, along with links. Markdown support in email clients has been a long time coming.
- JdeBP 7y agoMUAs that understood ad-hoc formatting with things like asterisks and underscores pre-date the invention of Markdown by more than a decade. They didn't really work well in practice.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoI find this surprising - I was a fan of BBcode, but Markdown ruined it for me !
- theaccordance 7y agoMy 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 7y agoThat'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.
- ubermonkey 7y agoThe 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.
- akerro 7y ago>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.
- GuB-42 7y agoLooking 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.
- petercooper 7y agoWorse 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.)