(This email is about 5.7 KB.) Hi Marcus & Greg,
At 2026-07-27T08:54:43+0200, Marcus Rohrmoser wrote: > recently I received several emails weighting way over what to expect > from plaintext emails. I have a slow uplink. At 2026-07-27T17:07:38+1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > I was wondering this too. It doesn't directly affect me, but it did > seem excessive. Sorry about that. Depending on what your pain threshold for email/ attachment sizes is, that was either completely or mostly my fault. I sent some attachments to the list yesterday that weighed in at 1.6 MB, 11 MB, and 3.7 MB respectively. And Deri sent one of 76 KB, a PDF of a squirrel on a log. ;-) Perhaps it didn't help that _last_ month was our lowest-traffic month in years. The first part of this month was almost dead quiet as well. So recency bias may play a role here, but I wouldn't dare claim that it's the whole story. [Marcus again:] > Is this normal here and will happen again or was this exceptional? ...neither? It's not normal, nor is it unprecedented or extremely rare. Here are the sizes of cumulative monthly mbox files corresponding to this list, going back to January 2024. $ (cd ~/Mail && ls -hl groff.202[456]*) -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 5.7M Jan 31 2024 groff.2024-01.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 1.9M Feb 28 2024 groff.2024-02.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 4.6M Mar 31 2024 groff.2024-03.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 2.3M Apr 30 2024 groff.2024-04.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 9.3M May 29 2024 groff.2024-05.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 2.8M Jun 28 2024 groff.2024-06.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 2.0M Jul 31 2024 groff.2024-07.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 5.7M Aug 31 2024 groff.2024-08.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 3.3M Sep 30 2024 groff.2024-09.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 32M Oct 29 2024 groff.2024-10.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 3.4M Nov 30 2024 groff.2024-11.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 3.0M Dec 31 2024 groff.2024-12.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 13M Jan 29 2025 groff.2025-01.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 1.5M Feb 26 2025 groff.2025-02.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 1.7M Mar 31 2025 groff.2025-03.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 216K Apr 29 2025 groff.2025-04.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 914K May 30 2025 groff.2025-05.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 3.8M Jun 30 2025 groff.2025-06.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 250K Jul 31 2025 groff.2025-07.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 712K Aug 31 2025 groff.2025-08.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 1.5M Sep 30 2025 groff.2025-09.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 2.5M Oct 31 2025 groff.2025-10.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 775K Dec 29 2025 groff.2025-12.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 1.8M Jan 31 15:06 groff.2026-01.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 3.7M Feb 28 18:42 groff.2026-02.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 1.6M Mar 30 18:49 groff.2026-03.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 843K Apr 30 19:28 groff.2026-04.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 362K May 29 12:14 groff.2026-05.mbox -rw-r--r-- 1 branden branden 165K Jun 26 14:54 groff.2026-06.mbox (Anyone can obtain these files from the GNU site. <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/mbox/groff/>) We see a wide variance in these data. Let's get quantitative. $ (cd ~/Mail && ls -l groff.202[456]*) \ | awk '{print $5}' | datamash range 1 median 1 mean 1 sstdev 1 33242119 2015232 3974174.3793103 6358996.8424221 To 2 significant figures, that's a range of 32 MB, a median of 2.0 MB, a mean of 4.0 MB, and a sample standard deviation of 6.4 MB. The foregoing implies that the groff list's monthly traffic level is right-skewed and not well modeled by a normal (Gaussian) distribution. That in turn makes it harder to reason about what to expect, as human experience and habits of thought are strongly adapted to situations where the Central Limit Theorem holds. We are likely to be startled by outliers that should not surprise us from a statistical standpoint. Humans struggle to deal with phenomena where the median is lower than the mean. We encounter it as a great scotoma of political economy, accounting for why societies around the world are excessively tolerant of L-shaped wealth and income distributions. Working-class people accept far higher tax burdens than they should, and let themselves get rolled by rhetoric implying that billionaires already pay far too much. But let's get practical, and deal with a matter we can affect today. I'd prefer to use the tools we have to apply "etiquette" coequally to all mailing list participants, including myself. I checked the Mailman admin interface for the groff list and there is _no_ inherent limit on message size at present. But we can set one. The info-groff list, for example, has a limit of 40 KB. That seems a bit low to me for a discussion list. We manage typesetting software and have to deal with PDFs. A certain amount of bandwidth is necessary for us to conduct business. That fact doesn't imply that we should impose no limit at all, however. I invite you and all other list participants to suggest figures for a limit. Let's see if we can reach a consensus on one. If so, I'm happy to configure that value into the Mailman setup for this list. I deliberately do not propose a number to start with, as I bear primary responsibility for both the problem _and_ for implementing any remedy. Tell me what you'd like to see! Regards, Branden
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