Pea Tyczynska 41d1cf453d Update limit to 1MB and update tests ...

SES rejects email messages bigger than 10485760 bytes (just over 10 MB per message (after base64 encoding)):
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/quotas.html#limits-message

Base64 is apparently wasteful because we use just 64 different values per byte, whereas a byte can represent
256 different characters. That is, we use bytes (which are 8-bit words) as 6-bit words. There is
a waste of 2 bits for each 8 bits of transmission data. To send three bytes of information
(3 times 8 is 24 bits), you need to use four bytes (4 times 6 is again 24 bits). Thus the base64 version
of a file is 4/3 larger than it might be. So we use 33% more storage than we could.
https://lemire.me/blog/2019/01/30/what-is-the-space-overhead-of-base64-encoding/

That brings down our max safe size to 7.5 MB == 7500000 bytes before base64 encoding

But this is not the end! The message we send to SES is structured as follows:
"Message": {
    'Subject': {
        'Data': subject,
    },
    'Body': {'Text': {'Data': body}, 'Html': {'Data': html_body}}
},
Which means that we are sending the contents of email message twice in one request: once in plain text
and once with html tags. That means our plain text content needs to be much shorter to make sure we
fit within the limit, especially since HTML body can be much byte-heavier than plain text body.

Hence, we decided to put the limit at 1MB, which is equivalent of between 250 and 500 pages of text.
That's still an extremely long email, and should be sufficient for all normal use, while at the same
time giving us safe margin while sending the emails through Amazon SES.

2020-10-29 14:07:49 +00:00

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