Outlook Express attachments

Status
Not open for further replies.

nosbm

Baseband Member
Messages
29
While using Outlook Express to send a one line email with an attached 4.43Mbyte file I noticed that in the properties of that email the size is given as 6061kbytes. See attached file, attachment.jpeg.

Could somebody please explain where this difference comes from and is it a feature only of Outlook Express or of all email software?

Best Regards.
 
Thank you for your response and apologies for the confusion. There is still no attached file however as I do not seem to be able to include attachments, even though the forum rules at the foot of the page say that I can.

If I had been able to send the jpg attachment it would show the top portion of the email with 4.43Mbytes as the size of the attached file and the corresponding email properties box showing that the email size was 6061kbytes.

The query being why is there such a difference.

Best Regards.
 
i honestly dont know, I haver never seen that before, or ever looked out for it. Maybe it has to do with the way the mail is sent. Possibly 2MB of headers and stuff. I dont know. Anyone else able to shine some light on this mystery?
 
You think that that would take up 1.4MB? Dosent seem too reasonable. An administrator would be pissed if 1.4mb of server space was taken up each time someone sent an email. Obviously not every email isa going to be that big, but somewhere there around.
 
Thanks for the responses.

The attached file is a 4.43Mbyte .pdf; also the conversion from Mbytes to kbytes gives 4536kbytes (ie 4.43x1024)which is still less than the size shown in the email properties, which is 6061kbytes.

The investigating that I have done myself seems to be saying that there is always an overhead in terms of size when attaching a file to an email. As I understand it all attachments have to be converted to ASCII using MIME encoding, a relatively inefficient process requiring an overhead of approximately 33%.

The following links have some further details:

http://www.networkcomputing.com/706/706work1.html

http://gnrt.terena.nl/content.php?section_id=46

http://support.dc-hosting.com/?_a=knowledgebase&_j=questiondetails&_i=21

Is this correct or am I misreading the situation?

Best Regards.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom