It appears that Wietse Venema <postfix-users@postfix.org> said: >With uniform or compressed payloads, 256 bytes become 261 on average, >thus it takes 978.9 bytes on average to expand into 998. Add CR >and LF to the 998, and we have an expansion of 1000/978.9=1.022 or >just a little over 2%.
That was my estimate too. I was rounding, so sue me. >It could have been a good idea 25 years ago. Turns out it came up on the ietf-smtp list in 2003. Here's the mail discussion and a strawman I-D that Ned Freed wrote for a deflate-8bit encoding that combines deflate compression (like gzip) with minimal escapes for 8BITMIME. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ietf-822/?gbt=1&index=VmGPBP83tzuzAzdKOwtckalMipE https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-freed-mime-newenc/ I agree that these days we routinely pass around ummpteen megabyte base64 messages and nobody cares. If we did care, the reasonable approach would be to stick the giant file on a web server and use message/external-body to refer to it. That is defined in RFC 2017 which was indeed 25 years ago. R's, John
