[geeks] Gmail's attraction

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 @ 17:56 -0400, Andrew Weiss said:

> There is some help for that problem in MS Exchange.  When Exchange 
> recognizes a file as being identical in an attachment to another one, 
> it implements single instance store... which means there is only one 
> copy of each file.  I think SQL Server 2000 does this a bit too.

It only does that, from what I remember, if the email had N recipients.

If you send the same email 1000 times, it's 1000 copies.

Since so much PC mailing software works that way...

Even if it does what you say for any email, think of the overhead in
doing all the attachment comparisons.

I mean... how would you implement that?  Every time an email comes in do
a digest of the attachments and then see if it already exists?

That's a lot of overhead on a busy server...

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The object of war is not to die for your
country but to make the other bastard die for his." -- General George S.
Patton]