Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates' question made some sense. If mails are 3k each, and you have 1 GB of space, how many mails do you need to receive per day to get out of space in 6 months?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilo...

the answer is 1826 mails per day. I assume what happened here is that they didn't have good stats of the mail sizes in the conversation and Bill tried to estimate something like this and as a result, he thought it was ridiculous.

View on HN

Maybe they email a lot with the kind of people who embed their fancy company logo as a 50K jpg into their mails, then you're down to 100 mails per day.

3k is a bit small...

consider, those are newspaper people. they send HTML emails, PDFs, scans, photos, all that stuff. wouldn't surprise me if they collected a few megs a day. busy people.

Version control over e-mail would hit that 7MB/day limit easily, when dealing with image formats. Makes sense.

> 3k is a bit small...

And Gates explicitly asked how big each email was, on average.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com