My Weird Prompts
Where Email Attachments Actually Live and Go
23:12
Email attachments seem like simple files handed between computers, but MIME transforms them into text packed directly inside the message body. Storing all that data poses an enormous engineering problem: attachments accounted for 85 percent of storage at Mail.Ru before deduplication. Mail systems dissect complete messages on disk, balance reference counters, hash encoded payloads, and handle…