Email Attachments - Consider Before You Embed!

I recently received an email from someone in a storage related distribution list. At the bottom of the email it has this bitmap image embedded in the email (I have saved it as a png file to compress it without losing any of its original quality and save space).

The only thing that made me notice it was that the email showed that it had an attachment, the only attachment was this image. I then started thinking, why use an image to say this, that takes up unnecessary space. I looked at the email properties and found that the size of this email was 54 KB. Not too bad, but I looked at another much longer email that had no embedded images or files and saw that the average was 7 KB. I saved the attachment out and found that his embedded image was 28 KB by itself. There again, not a huge amount. Then I looked at how many people were on this distribution list (all of the recipients are on the same Exchange server) and found that there were roughly 2,500 people that received that email and attachment.With that one 28 KB attachment it has consumed around 70 MB of storage.
             28 KB * 2500 =  70,000Kb (68.4 MB)
Still not a whole lot. But, considering that I could go back and see that this same person has sent over 25 emails to this distribution list you now have 1.67 GB of storage consumed it is starting to look like a lot of wasted storage.
             68.4 * 25 =  1,708.98 MB (1.67 GB)
 
I know that I have seen this same attachment on a lot of emails not only from this poster but from others as well. If only 4 other users have this same embedded attachment and they send 10 emails each then they have consumed around 2.67 GB of storage for their attachment only. This does not include any actual useful data.
            4 * 28 KB = 112 KB
            10 * 112 KB = 1,120 KB
            1120 KB * 2500 = 2,800,000 KB (2,734.375 MB) or (2.67 GB)
If over a 6 month period these same 4 users send an additional 2500 emails  that has 10 people carbon copied then they have consumed yet another 2.67 GB bringing them up to 5.34 GB of storage! To put this into perspective an MP3 version of AC/DC's song Back in Black takes roughly 3.95MB of storage. You could store 1,367 copies of that song in the same amount of storage used for the attachment in this email.That is over 136 individual music CDs. If a storage administrator found a single user on this same Local Area Network storing 136 CDs on corporate owned storage it would be grounds for dismissal.

What makes this stand out to me is that this is a distribution for Storage Professionals, people who should understand the implications of extra data embedded into an email, I could understand if these were normal End Users, but not those whose job it is to minimize the amount of money spent on storing data. Maybe they should change their logo to a text version that states:

Consider Your Storage: Only include attachments when absolutely necessary to get your point across! And if you are going to print this email delete it from your inbox.