A simple and practicable email storage space compression method

Email servers of large-scale enterprises generally demand large storage space. To mitigate the problem, this paper proposes a simple and practicable email compression method, effectively reducing emails storage space on mail servers. In our method, emails are MIME-decoded first; then attachments are chopped and duplicate attachments removed; finally the attachment files and plain-text email files are compressed. Experiments are performed on two operating email servers, the experiments result indicates that our approach can save more than half of the email storage space.