Re: comment on reducing padding

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On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Jonathan Morton wrote:

>> according to my own non-scientific research, most email addresses are 
>> 15-30 characters. the amount of padding these stamps contain just seems 
>> ridiculous.
>
> Most users won't see it.  How many ordinary users do you know who 
> regularly read mail with "full headers" displayed?  The padding is there 
> for performance reasons - putting the tail of the count field in the 
> right place adds 10-15% performance, easily.
>
> Anyway, the padding gets "used up" quite neatly if you start adding 
> extension fields, such as:
==========================

the padding is used up until we hit what, about 88 bytes being stamped? 
and then we jump to a 116 byte stamp.

i agree that most people will never know it's there, but an email 
addressed to 10 people would carry >1K of extra headers (the trailing 
spaces when using "X" makes this worse). i'm not saying that this will 
break email, but the extra message size can become non-trivial.

i'm also not suggesting that this is any reason not to use hashcash... but 
it seems like there's room to optimize this and make the stamps more 
compact.

  	...atom

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