Why do old e-mails take up so much disk space?

[Orionaut]

Now, as a business, I like to keep old e-mails.

My "Inbox" has around 13,000 old mails.

I recognise that many of them are ones I could safely delete. But this isn't the point.

e-mails are essentially text. I wouldn't have expected even 20,000 of them to take up more than 50Mb.

And yet, according to "Treesize" my stored e-mail folder is actually one of the largest non-media folders on my HDD.

It is literally many Gb.

Why??

 

[Begbie]

Picture signatures, junk mail full of pictures.

Pretty much it. MBs on average per email most likely when you include all nonsense pics and other attachments. (emails aren't just text)

 

[Feek]

As said above, when email default format changed from plain text to html or rich text, the size went up massively.

 

[( |-| |2 ][ $]

Can it be “compacted”?

 

[jsmoke]

Can you not extract one of these email and either open it in notepad or a web browser and check why it's taking so much space. Must be images though. 20,000x 0.1MB = 2GB

 

[Scort]

Now, as a business, I like to keep old e-mails.

My "Inbox" has around 13,000 old mails.

I recognise that many of them are ones I could safely delete. But this isn't the point.

e-mails are essentially text. I wouldn't have expected even 20,000 of them to take up more than 50Mb.

And yet, according to "Treesize" my stored e-mail folder is actually one of the largest non-media folders on my HDD.

It is literally many Gb.

Why??

Sadly, gone are the days of storing many documents on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk - files are massive these days; I blame lazy programmers In seriousness though, as others have pointed out, the size of emails adds up quickly - even one with only a few replies can be in excess of 300 KB, add in graphics and attachments and this can quickly grow above 1 MB in size.

 

[touch]

How do you manage to receive 13,000 emails and still not notice that they can contain more than just text