Has anyone else notice the large size of an empty email?

Question

I sent an email with just the destination address (myself) no subject, no body and no attachments from myself to myself.

The email was sent from me to me (my office 365 exchange server) and the size of the email was 33KB,

FYI I cut and pasted the header to notepad to determine the header was about 4KB (I could swear an small email used to be about 1KB, when I first started playing with emails...)

I did the same test sending from gmail to my office 365, again, no subject no body, no attachment and now the message is 43KB in size.

FYI I again Cut and pasted the header again was about 4KB same as before.

So where is the extra 29KB or 39KB getting generated and WHY?

Starting to understand why people are running out of email storage if a simple/small message is now 30 to 40 times larger than it used to be...

If anyone has any insight on this, and clues on how to make small messages smaller, that would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks

Ray

Answer 1

Hi @Ray Eti ,

Based on my experience, seems like it’s normal nowadays that the size of an empty mail can reach approximately 40kb.

FYI I cut and pasted the header to notepad to determine the header was about 4KB (I could swear an small email used to be about 1KB, when I first started playing with emails...)

Considering that factors like the storage mechanism or the actual content of a txt file and a message in the mailbox is completely different, I don’t think it make any sense to compare the size of the notepad file with the size of the message.

As for what you mentioned, it was only about 1kb before. My personal speculation may be that with the advancement of email technology over the years, the security of emails has become stronger, and the format has become richer, so the encoding method and format may be different from before. There are also more message headers than before.

clues on how to make small messages smaller, that would be greatly appreciated...

For emails with email bodies, you may consider changing the format from html to plain text. But considering the mailbox storage space, make small mails smaller is not that meaningful, instead, I’d recommend considering reducing the size of large mails. (For example, from 100kb to 1kb, and from 10MB to 5MB, the latter is obviously more efficient.) Large emails are generally due to pictures or large attachments, so you can refer to this document to reduce the size：Reduce the size of pictures and attachments in Outlook email messages - Microsoft Support。

In addition, for mailbox storage space, if necessary, you can refer to this document：Reduce the size of your mailbox and Outlook Data Files (.pst and .ost) - Microsoft Support

Regards

Shaofan

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment". 

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.