Seven Thousand, Seven Hundred Eighty-Six E-mail Ads Per Day
Some alternate thoughts about unsolicited e-mail advertising
Yes. All we have to do is convince ISPs that it's in their best interests to increase their e-mail storage by a factor of 34 and their bandwidth by a factor of 100, without compensation. (We may be paying the sending ISP through the nose, but the receiving ISP gets bupkis, so at least it doesn't come out of our pockets.)
Figure that each e-mail will have 1,000 bytes of headers, 1,000 bytes of ad copy and two tiny 10K pictures, for a total of 22K per e-mail. 7,786 e-mail ads at 22K apiece makes for just over 171 megabytes in each ISP's mail queue, for each address, each day. Most ISPs allow about five megabytes per address; they will have to increase their e-mail storage by a factor of 34.
You can, but that doesn't cut bandwidth or cost for the recipient; all it does is make you pay for more bandwidth. When you send bulk e-mail, you transmit one copy addressed to many recipients, and the receiving system does the work of making individual copies for the recipients. But when you send links, you'll transmit one copy of each picture when each recipient opens each e-mail. So you save when you send pictures instead of links to them, because the recipient pays more of the cost of receiving your advertising.
Which do you think is more likely to be paying the cost of your e-mails to a million people: the few hundred dollars per month you pay your provider, or the $22,000,000.00 per month they pay to their providers? The bandwidth and storage required to handle 7,786 e-mail ads per address per day cost the recipient's ISP real money. Then each recipient occupies extra bandwidth, and sometimes a phone line, when downloading the 7,786 messages. Unless you fantasize that the ISP provides all these extra facilities by deducting these costs from profits, you must know that the ISP raises its prices to the consumer to cover costs. It should thus be obvious that each recipient pays more to get 7,786 e-mails per day than he would to get just one e-mail per week from Aunt Sophie.
It's a tradeoff for them. They save a little bandwidth, but use huge amounts of expensive disk storage. (ISP's can't use the inexpensive storage we can use in our home computers, because it won't stand up to the rigors of heavy, 24-hour-a-day use.) I suspect most ISP's would prefer the links, if that didn't encourage advertisers to use more pictures and thus more bandwidth. But it does.
It's refused with a "temporary refusal", so it will sit in your outgoing mail queue until the recipient frees up his mail allocation by downloading his mail. If the mail is not delivered in five days, most mailers will just delete the mail. Be prepared to have several million messages waiting in your outgoing queue for that long.
A 56K modem goes about 8,000 bytes per second on a good day... 21,411 seconds, or just under six hours to download mail each day.
She should be able to get 1,600 bytes per second. Figure just over 29.7 hours per day to download her mail. Hmmm... she'll either have to buy a new modem to get all her ads, or quit using e-mail.
Possibly not, because mixed in with the 7,786 ads, they believe there might be a message from Aunt Sophie, or the latest hot gaming tips.
They probably won't get Aunt Sophie's message. E-mail fulfillment houses will beat Aunt Sophie's ISP to the recipient's mailbox, filling it before it can receive Aunt Sophie's e-mail. Smart fulfillment houses will gimmick their mail systems so that they don't quit after five days or wait long periods between attempts, as normal mail systems do; that should edge Aunty right out of the user's inbox.