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Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

70 GB / 600K emails = 122KB per email. That's a large average even with headers. To put things in perspective, Costco's massive marketing email sent to me this morning is 138K including headers.

So the question is, what were people sending though Lavabit that averaged 122K and would have attracted attention? Therein probably lies the reason for all of this.

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If Lavabit allowed large attachments, I'd say photos.

122KB is the average. The majority of emails were probably 1-2KB. Then newsletters, around 50KB. Lastly, emails with attached photos, ~5MB.

Probably follows a simple Pareto distribution: 20% of emails comprised 80% of the total storage required.

A lot of outliers are screwing with that average. Think emails with powerpoint/keynote attachments, rich pdfs, photos, etc.

Average, not median. A thousand 50KB email are easily offset by a few 30MB email with max size attachments. 122KB average isn't unusual.

Most of the companies I receive email from these days have 122Kb of crap attached to the bottom by their outgoing MTA. You know: awards, disclaimers, twitter icons, facebook icons.

Makes me want to fuck off back to plain text.

The 70GB probably includes attachments, so quite a bit of that number could just be certain users sending large attachments on a regular basis.

It is possibly 600k non-spam emails per day? With the 70GB including all data w/ spam. Because with ~300k accounts 600k emails per day is only 2 per account which isn't much taking spam into account.

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