Over the past few days I’ve been in e-mail contact with someone, a little over a dozen messages each. The file size of each one is getting bigger and bigger. 400kb, 900kb, 2mb, 2mb, 3mb… the last one she sent was 7 megs!
This is all plain text, but I’ve noticed a whole lot of white space at the end. Like hundreds of pages of it.
What could cause this?
Are these emails actual text messages or HTML emails? If the former it is very easy to spot whatever is bloating out their size. However, I suspect they are HTML emails and it’s very easy to increase the document size without ant outward appearance of that increased size.
At the same time it’s been my experience that most people do not trim their emails when responding but merely add to their bulk. The classic is someone who posts out an email with an attachment. Anyone else who then responds (too often sent reply all) compounds the problem by not deleting the attachment everyone got the first time. Ad infinitum.
(We have similar problems here with Dopers who quote an entire posting only to add a few sentences of their own in their own post when their comment is only addressing a small part of the original post.)
Amen.
(for the record, I almost quoted your whole post to be ironic, but then decided to be tutorial instead.)
How can I tell?
FWIW, this is MS Outlook probably configured right out of the box. I don’t know what my friend is using, but it’s probably the same thing.
I usually reply without deleting former messages, and I’ve done this with several people, but the file sizes usually don’t get to be a problem until we’ve replied to each other a couple hundred times. But in this case it’s less than 20.
A true text email is written in ASCII text, contains no hidden ingredients or artificial fillers. It can’t by its very definition. Also available is rich text email and HTML email. Here’s a brief description of all three. Here’s Microsoft’s tech description for rich text email.
You may want to find a configuration switch within your email app to view the source code of the emails. That can help your detective work to see why each successive email in the thread is growing bigger and bigger than what it should “normally” be.
I’m guessing there’s an image in there like a corporate logo, and your friend pulled the vector art image for it when setting up a signature. Those files can be huge (because they scale up to near-infinite sizes).
When I use Outlook, if I try to print an e-mail without opening it, it will print if it’s text, but if it’s HTML, I get an error message saying “Please open this HTML message to print it.”
So, try closing the e-mail, then highlight the e-mail in the Inbox and click “Print”.
A message I got from someone else today just printed. An earlier message from my friend gave me the HTML error. So that answers that.
In my latest reply, I stripped out the million pages of whitespace. We’ll see what happens when she replies.
Next time try and look at the source code. It might surprise you what’s in there.
psst! please take this in the spirit in which it’s intended: as useless geek info for the mildly curious:
Vector graphics scale infinitely for the same reason that they’re generally very small. Vector formats contains calculations that describe the graphics in mathematical terms. Scale is completely variable, and there’s no practical difference in the file size for a graphic of a circle 2" across and one 2 miles across.
Raster graphics are not this way. They contain color information for each pixel in the image, so the size of the image (in pixels) and the potential color range contribute to the file size. bigger picture sizes = larger file sizes.
The confusion is that vector graphics are often “simple” graphics, and simple graphics can be saved more efficiently in certain raster formats (such as .gif). Therefore, people have learned to equate the word “vector” with formats like .gif, even though .gifs are actually raster. You cannot scale a .gif up any more than a .bmp or .jpg. (other common raster formats)
Also no one sends graphics around in vector formats. Although most browsers can render simple vector graphic format (.svg), they’re essentially unheard of except by graphic designers.
Lastly, nothing in an email chain would cause the graphic to get larger, although if someone has a graphic in their signature, every time they replied to the email chain they’d be including another xKB of picture to the chain.
Terribly interesting, I know - 
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One common way to get HTML bloat is to write something in a word processor and save it as HTML. You can sometimes get things like a font being specified (the same font in each case) for each individual letter.
In reply to Misery Loves Co.: I think what Munch was suggesting was that somewhere along the way, a vector graphic was converted into a raster graphic. If the vector graphic was scaled very large when this happened, it could result in a very large file size for the raster graphic.
And the file size of a gif won’t scale up in the same way as that of a bmp. For a simple image, the file size of a gif will scale up roughly as the total length of all edges in the image (which in turn will be proportional to the edge length), while the size of a bmp will scale as the total area of the image (edge length squared). You could have a million by million pixel image of a single solid color that’s only a few bytes, in gif format.
Does Outlook do this? Thunderbird removes attachments when replying by default. They stay when the message is forwarded.
I’m not suggesting the graphic file is getting larger. I’m suggesting there’s a very large graphic file in the signature that gets inserted into every reply the other person sends, which is why the file size of the e-mails are doubling upon every iteration.
This makes a lot of sense. A friend has a little animated graphic of a quill pen writing in a book as a part of his signature; the problem is that this makes every e-mail he sends something over 40K in size. On one memorable exchange in which three of us, including that friend and me, were conferring over an issue involving a 28K attachment file and replying with the message replied to quoted, the final set of e-mails were over 500K in size, simply because the graphic and the attachment were included numerous times. Gaah!
You’re getting an email with multiple stacked copies of the signature graphic embedded in the message, even if the email is hiding them from you. It’s also likely your email buddy created a personal signature using an unnecessarily huge pic or graphic as part of the signature. They sized this down visually so it fit as part of the sig. graphic, but it’s still a needlessly huge resolution and size.
That’s not what I got from the post in question, but if you did then perhaps my filters are off.
Which speaks to the great efficiency of .gifs at storing raster information for “simple” graphics. I generally take “scale” wrt graphics to mean changes to the display area - I.E., making a 10px x 10px picture a 200px by 200px picture. Doing so to a .gif will result in a small increase in filesize, as you say, but the picture will still look - in the vernacular - like ass. An actual vector graphic could be scaled as such with no degradation in the quality of the image. Perhaps this difference in the use of the word “scale” is where I’m out of sync in the conversation.
Apologies. This is not how I interpreted your first post.
Sorry for the hijack - I’m out.
I was thinking the person may have used a word processor. The file seems to increase exponentially the more times you use the processor on the file.
Whatever was in there, it wasn’t displaying as a graphic. After the last message (the one sent first, at the bottom) there were thousands of line feeds, some preceded by a space or two.