John Levine:
> 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.
I demonstrated that I am a worse sales person, when I pointed out
that the expansion rate can range from 0.2% (when no quoting is
needed) to over 100% (when every octet needs quoting).
> >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
Note that the quoting scheme came up in the context of compressed
data, where I agree that the 2% expansion claim can be strong.
With uncompressed data, YMMV.
Thanks for the history lesson :-)
Wietse
