email attachments

[Sysman]

It doesn't matter whether you zip binary attachments or not, the size of the email will always be bigger as the email protocol dictates attachments are encoded into printable text characters, so each binary byte become multiple text characters on the wire.

Decoding Internet Attachments - A Tutorial

It's because the Internet and Email was invented by Unix geeks. If Microsoft had invented all this stuff everything would be binary, proprietary and require upgrades every two years.

Actually it's not so much Unix geeks as the state of comms way back when - modems and terminals which only transmitted 7 bits per byte. This was fine for US-ASCII, which doesn't have accented characters, and binary was a no-no due to a combination of speed and cost.

If I sent you an email from one of my old systems using a plain text mail client, all you would see in the body of the message source is "Hello DP, how's the price of gold today?", but Outlook would by default send that in Quoted printable format

Worse still, many modern email clients will send the plain text, plus an HTML version, which is an awful lot more bytes. You can see this effect on Usenet if you use a plain text news reader. A 100 byte message body can soon turn into several KB.

[AtW]

That doesn't explain why his 7MB attachment makes a 21MB email. That has to be because he's using a mac.

Maybe there is a simple explanation - scooter's math skills are not good enough to add up properly?

[AtW]

An e-mail just in, 3 attachments 7MB total file size of all 3 files. Email size 21MB! What's going on?

7+7+7=21.

[scooterscot]

That doesn't explain why his 7MB attachment makes a 21MB email. That has to be because he's using a mac.

The files I received were PGP encrypted attachments. Might have had something to do with it.

[AtW]

The files I received were PGP encrypted attachments. Might have had something to do with it.

Maybe it was GZ attachment?

[NickFitz]

That doesn't explain why his 7MB attachment makes a 21MB email. That has to be because he's using a mac.

Just sent myself a 6.9MB photo using Mac Mail.app; it came out the other end at 9.4MB, which is around 137%

[AtW]

Base64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[TimberWolf]

I just did the same. Yes, the results do appear to be 137% larger.

Here are the before and after pics (possibly NSFW).....
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/...cec257ea2d.jpg

I tried to make out the picture of my non-naked lady in my encoded text, but though there were patterns discernible, I couldn't make out my non dirty picture content. Might have worked with boobies?

[d000hg]

God you really are spectacularly, phenomenally stupid aren't you?

A half decent attempt to distract from the fact you haven't the slightest clue either... we know this is the case because if you DID know, you would be unable to resist gloating about it.

[petergriffin]

So wait a minute are you IT whizz kids telling me the protocol used in email transmission sucks?

Why has someone not invented a binary email protocol?

Would sending less data not be a green thing to do?

If I am not mistaken with UUCP you can send a binary file. Usenet uses UUCP and on the alt.binaries.xx you can download binary files.