Thank you Scott!
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of R. Scott Perry
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 9:47 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Message size during transfer
>I have a couple of follow up questions on a topic that was discussed in
>July, 2003. Apparently MS Outlook may say that your message is 1 MB (for
>example) including attachments, but when you try to send the message it
>fails because it BECOMES larger than that during the SMTP process.
>1. Is this true for all mail servers, or just Imail?
That is strictly an Outlook issue. Outlook generates the exact same E-mail
no matter what mailserver is used.
>2. Does this happen for HTML only or Rich Text and Plain text too?
It probably depends on the encoding that is used. Of course, Microsoft
might say that the E-mail is 4 bytes ("test", which is all you wrote), when
in fact it is 8K (because you used Microsoft Word to send the E-mail,
without knowing that Word has *huge* overhead in an E-mail).
>3. Can anyone expand upon Tripp's explanation below? What exactly happens
>and why?
Attachments (and sometimes message bodies) sent via E-mail are usually
encoded. The 8-bit attachment needs to be converted to the 7-bit E-mail
body. Doing so typically adds about 33% to the size of the E-mail.
>4. What kind of expansion is typical? 10%, 50%?
Usually about 33% for binary attachments. Text or text-like attachments
may add less; it's technically possible to add more than 33%, but that
should be very rare (only with a poorly designed mail client).
For the curious, it's 33% because every 3 bytes of an attachment use up 4
bytes in the E-mail. 4/3 is 1.3333... There is a slight amount of
overhead due to MIME headers, but it usually doesn't add much extra to the
size of the E-mail. It would only be important when very small files were
used.
>5. When it was downloaded by the recipient, would it revert back to
>registering in Outlook as 1 MB?
Probably. If it only counts the actual size of the attachment (not the
size of the E-mail) when sending, it probably does the same when receiving.
>6. Does this only happen with MS Outlook?
I'm not aware of any other mail clients that give an inaccurate size for
E-mails. :)
-Scott
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