The said:
When I receive an email with an attachment the actual attachment size is
always half what is stated in the size column of Microsoft Outlook.
Does anyone know why this is so. I am concerned what download amount is
taked of my Broadband usage account.
Thanks
You left out WHERE is the "actual" attachment size. If you mean that
the size gets smaller when you save the attachment to a file on your
hard disk then, yes, it will always be smaller.
All e-mail - and I mean ALL e-mail - gets sent as plain text. HTML is
text with tags inside of it. RTF (TNEF) is text with a winmail.dat
attachment (hidden by Microsoft's e-mail clients but not others) that
contains the formatting information. Attachments must get converted
into text to put inside a MIME section within the body of the message.
Encoding binary content into a long text string results in bloating the
size of the content. The size of the text used to encode the binary
content is 137%, or more, the size of the original binary file.
When you received the e-mail with the attachment, that long text string
has to be decoded back into its binary equivalent to save into a file.
So the bloated encoded text string results in less bytes when decoded to
put into a file.
The actual size of the e-mail (with or without attachments encoded into
the body of the e-mail) is shown in the Size column. That *is* the
actual size of the e-mail.
