--On Tuesday, March 4, 2003 6:17 PM +0100 Arnt Gulbrandsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|> But if I'm just browsing message headers, only thing I need is ENVELOPE. |> BODYSTRUCTURE is needed only when actually opening the message. | | Isn't BODYSTRUCTURE mostly the same as ENVELOPE? Sometimes there's lots of | body parts and BODYSTRUCTURE is big, but usually there's just the one | text/* part and BODYSTRUCTURE is nice and small. | | What size is ENVELOPE*x+BODYSTRUCTURE*y, if you optimize for the smallest | possible x? And for the smallest possible y? | | (Yes, I realize you need to fetch certain other things. Thread information | and the subject field spring to mind.)
A quick check of the last 100 messages in my INBOX:
FETCH x:* (ENVELOPE) gives 39211 bytes FETCH x:* (BODYSTRUCTURE) gives 14912 bytes
As another example, the last 100 message from my spam mailbox:
FETCH x:* (ENVELOPE) gives 38412 bytes FETCH x:* (BODYSTRUCTURE) gives 13946 bytes
This is interesting because the spam folder contains a lot of multipart/alternative html messages, but my inbox typically does not, however the total byte counts and thus relative counts between envelope and bodystructure are almost the same. Looks like a few multipart signed messages in my INBOX are added a significant amount to bodystructure via all the extra MIME parameters that they have.
From this the penalty (at least for me) of getting bodystructure as well asenvelope is not that great. Of course this is no real indicator of how things are in the real world. I suspect people that get a lot of email forwarded from (e.g. AOL accounts) that have multiple nested message/rfc822's are going to be a lot worse off!
-- Cyrus Daboo
