102KB ought to be enough for any email | Hacker News Reader

102KB ought to be enough for any email

shkspr.mobi

97 pointsedent76 comments

> 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.

> 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.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

>Staff at magazines take a lot of pride in layout, content, imagery, and attention to detail.

Their attention to details is wasted on some people, my thunderbird and roundcubemail never shows remote images and styles, and none of my family members ever complained on that.

Most print magazines are 90% ads. As for the "local newsletter" style, at least where I live these have all been bought out by larger media groups. To say the content is anemic would be generous, but I can't "unsubscribe" from the physical copies because they are delivered to every mailbox in the area, therefore I cannot voice my opposition to this wasteful media. I'm sure they list me under their distribution numbers of "satisfied readers" of their publication.

With online publications it is obviously different, but I wonder to what extent people are actually engaging with the content of these newsletters. What percent simply get auto filtered into the spam or trash, because the native unsubscribe link was too hard to find?

You'd be surprised how many people actually want advertisements, even ones with lots of styling and colored pictures.

I worked on a email filtering solution in my previous job. One of our biggest challenges was not how to classify spam from normal mail, but how to make sure to distinguish between spam people wanted and spam.

Correct. I use email newsletters to stay on top of upcoming concerts. It’s not spam, and most are heavily styled.

Is it advertising? Sure, definitely, but it’s advertising I actually want.

How else am I going to have my 1024x768 picture of a lion and inspirational quote as my email signature?

I can tell you that there are many people who would be affected by a size limit... and I want them to be.

The 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.

Literally 100% untrue. I'm in many associations where just normal html newsletter of what's happening and what events are coming, _without_ _any_ _pictures_ _or_ _media_, is clipped.

It's insane and there is no excuse.

Then you have way too much HTML formatting in your email. Maybe people are using something like Word to create it, which will add all sorts of duplicate and remnants of tags everywhere. 102kb is a lot of text.

Looking at the mails I see from Outlook loving business people in corporations I would say it's true that people want colorful mail - not only colorful in words, but in display.

And used properly there can be a value in having more options in formatting.

For my mails I try to be plain with 80 chars per line, but I've sent two HTML mails this year already, in situations where specific highlighting seemed useful.

It is an excuse. Formatting (should) add virtually nothing. 102kb is a lot of text. There are pdf books that are smaller than that.

I too use colours and table from time to time in e-mails.

But unless their e-mails are the length of a Shakespeare play, people aren't hitting the 102 KB limit with <b> tags.

They're hitting it with <td valign=3D"top" class=3D"pre= headerContainer" style=3D"padding-top: 9px;mso-table-lspace: 0pt;mso-table-= rspace: 0pt;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;"><ta= ble border=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" cellspacing=3D"0" width=3D"100%" class= =3D"mcnTextBlock" style=3D"min-width: 100%;border-collapse: collapse;mso-ta= ble-lspace: 0pt;mso-table-rspace: 0pt;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-te= xt-size-adjust: 100%;"> tags

Well, if I were writing by hand I certainly won't produce such a code. If I were using a visual editor where I can produce a table and drag columns and rows and make it nice (just like a non-technical user would) such code is produced quickly.

Especially tables can become verbose, especially if the toolmaker wanted to support as many HTML rendering engines (in mail the variety is higher than with browsers) as possible while providing "pixel perfect" results.

Of course 99% of mails doing this, do this for spamy/marketing reasons, not since it brings benefit to the content. (Which is no difference to typography and layout in web or print - brand recognition before content is common)

almost everyone hates ads especially in their email

This may surprise you, but there really are people who like getting "circulars" from their favorite stores by email. I know (older) relatives that intentionally stay subscribed to supermarkets and clothing retailers so that they can read every single email looking for special offers, just like it was 1995 and they were clipping coupons from the Sunday supplements.

I'm not "old" and I love getting my daily email from eBuyer (basically the UK equivalent of Newegg) and seeing what new products, peripherals, SSDs, etc. are on offer and available. Indeed, there are quite a few such mails I enjoy.

I get plaintext (enforced by the list software) emails of meeting minutes from an organization that are clipped.

Or at least did; these days I've got a personal account elsewhere for such things.

I often paste images into emails

Those are attachments, even if they don't look like it in Gmail. Images aren't subject to this particular constraint.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am pretty sure Google doesn't "filter" e-mails, they're almost surely doing a full rewrite through HTML-internal-HTML where internal is a safe representation of that e-mail.

> 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.

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.

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

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...

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

[2] - http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/un...

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

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).

I 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).

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.

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

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

It's a long play.

It'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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!

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.

Yes. If an email is bigger than 102KB (excluding attachments), there's a 99% that I don't want it.

View 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.

Not 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.

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

Perhaps only a subset of Markdown.

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

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

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.

MUAs 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.

I find this surprising - I was a fan of BBcode, but Markdown ruined it for me !

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.

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.

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.

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.

How 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.

The 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.

Makes 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.

Apple'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.

Excuse me, but invoices should NEVER be multi-megabyte PDFs. Fix your PDF generator.

Its most likely just poor image compression from their cameras or scanners or whatever the drivers are using.

I once worked on an app on phones that used libjpeg because te built-in 'hardware assisted' jpeg encoder was so bad. The typical photo was 5MB and simply reencoding it with libjpeg defaults resulted in under 1MB.

A simple bit of command-line magic can typically shrink those images massively before you email them onward.

>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.

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.)

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

Just ditch gmail and send plain text email.

>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 :'( :'(

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