Comment by pella
5 hours ago
imho: the future is a specialized compressor optimized for your specific format. ( https://openzl.org/ , ... )
5 hours ago
imho: the future is a specialized compressor optimized for your specific format. ( https://openzl.org/ , ... )
This seems very cool. Was going to suggest submitting it, but I see there was a fairly popular thread 5 months ago for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492803
That is an interesting link.
Does gmail use a special codec for storing emails ?
The biggest savings for a service like GMail are going to be based around deduplication - e.g. if you can recognize that a newsletter went out to a thousand subscribers and store those all as deltas from a "canonical" copy - congratulations, that's >1000:1 compression, better than you could achieve with any general-purpose compression. Similarly, if you can recognize that an email is an Amazon shipping confirmation or a Facebook message notification or some other commonly repeated "form letter", you can achieve huge savings by factoring out all the common elements in them, like images or stylesheets.
I kind of doubt they would do this to be honest. Every near-copy of a message is going to have small differences in at least the envelope (not sure if encoding differences are also possible depending on the server), and possibly going to be under different guarantees or jurisdictions. And it would just take one mistake to screw things up and leak data from one person to another. All for saving a few gigabytes over an account's lifetime. Doesn't really seem worth it, does it?