Reply to: email attachments

[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.

[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.

[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?

[AtW]

Base64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[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]

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

Maybe it was GZ attachment?

[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]

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.

[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?

[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.

[DimPrawn]

I've just sent myself an email containing nothing but an jpeg image (not of a naked lady), size (unencoded) 873 kb.
MIME Base-64 encoded size was reported as 1196 kb, so that's almost exactly the 137% predicted for that encoding system.
Base64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've just sent myself a jpeg of a naked lady and I couldn't give a flying **** how big the file was.

[TimberWolf]

I've just sent myself an email containing nothing but an jpeg image (not of a naked lady), size (unencoded) 873 kb.
MIME Base-64 encoded size was reported as 1196 kb, so that's almost exactly the 137% predicted for that encoding system.
Base64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[doodab]

When the ARPANET (which eventually became the Internet) was young, its use was restricted to some universities, government, the military, and a small number of companies (usually military contractors and/or telecommunications companies). In those olden times, getting computers to talk to each other was very tricky, for Unicode had not yet been thought of, and US-ASCII was the most widely-used character encoding standard.

US-ASCII is a 7-bit encoding, and this made it difficult to send 8-bit bytes, as even computers which had 8-bit bytes (which not all did) would oftentimes be running software which assumed that the eighth bit could be ignored or thrown away. When such systems were connected to the network and messages passed through them on the way to their destination, the concomitant corruption of the eighth bit caused weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. For some systems left the eighth bit alone, and some set it, and some reset it.

Then Jon Postel, who was much cleverer than the rest of us, wrote RFC821, which specified that email would use 7 bits, and the eighth bit would always be zero. And there was much rejoicing, for now it was possible to send messages concerning Star Trek (TOS, obviously) and patterns of Xs that looked a bit like naked ladies if you stood a long way away and squinted and had a vivid imagination, even from one university unto another, or to any of the other couple of hundred computers that comprised the net in those days.

But it came to pass that the netizens wanted to send proper pictures of naked ladies, one unto the other, because their university department had just got this really cool scanner that operated at, like, 72dpi and only cost a quarter of a million bucks.

Therefore Borenstein and Freed did publish RFC1521, which drew upon the encoding scheme described in RFC1421 to define a Base64 encoding scheme, which allowed 8-bit bytes to be converted into characters that could be represented in 6 bits (specifically, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx yz0123456789+/) . And the netizens did rejoice, and sent pictures of naked ladies back and forth; and each picture was about 137% of the size (in bytes) it had been in the original 8-bit encoding, but that didn't matter because it was a small price to pay for seeing pictures of boobies.

And it hasn't broken yet, so they haven't fixed it. More accurately, although there are specifications allowing for 8-bit email transmission, nobody bothers to implement them because it isn't worth the hassle.

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

[AtW]

When the ARPANET (which eventually became the Internet) was young, its use was restricted to some universities, government, the military, and a small number of companies (usually military contractors and/or telecommunications companies). In those olden times, getting computers to talk to each other was very tricky, for Unicode had not yet been thought of, and US-ASCII was the most widely-used character encoding standard.

US-ASCII is a 7-bit encoding, and this made it difficult to send 8-bit bytes, as even computers which had 8-bit bytes (which not all did) would oftentimes be running software which assumed that the eighth bit could be ignored or thrown away. When such systems were connected to the network and messages passed through them on the way to their destination, the concomitant corruption of the eighth bit caused weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. For some systems left the eighth bit alone, and some set it, and some reset it.

Then Jon Postel, who was much cleverer than the rest of us, wrote RFC821, which specified that email would use 7 bits, and the eighth bit would always be zero. And there was much rejoicing, for now it was possible to send messages concerning Star Trek (TOS, obviously) and patterns of Xs that looked a bit like naked ladies if you stood a long way away and squinted and had a vivid imagination, even from one university unto another, or to any of the other couple of hundred computers that comprised the net in those days.

But it came to pass that the netizens wanted to send proper pictures of naked ladies, one unto the other, because their university department had just got this really cool scanner that operated at, like, 72dpi and only cost a quarter of a million bucks.

Therefore Borenstein and Freed did publish RFC1521, which drew upon the encoding scheme described in RFC1421 to define a Base64 encoding scheme, which allowed 8-bit bytes to be converted into characters that could be represented in 6 bits (specifically, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx yz0123456789+/) . And the netizens did rejoice, and sent pictures of naked ladies back and forth; and each picture was about 137% of the size (in bytes) it had been in the original 8-bit encoding, but that didn't matter because it was a small price to pay for seeing pictures of boobies.

And it hasn't broken yet, so they haven't fixed it. More accurately, although there are specifications allowing for 8-bit email transmission, nobody bothers to implement them because it isn't worth the hassle.

Good way to kill thread Nick

[NickFitz]

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?

When the ARPANET (which eventually became the Internet) was young, its use was restricted to some universities, government, the military, and a small number of companies (usually military contractors and/or telecommunications companies). In those olden times, getting computers to talk to each other was very tricky, for Unicode had not yet been thought of, and US-ASCII was the most widely-used character encoding standard.

US-ASCII is a 7-bit encoding, and this made it difficult to send 8-bit bytes, as even computers which had 8-bit bytes (which not all did) would oftentimes be running software which assumed that the eighth bit could be ignored or thrown away. When such systems were connected to the network and messages passed through them on the way to their destination, the concomitant corruption of the eighth bit caused weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. For some systems left the eighth bit alone, and some set it, and some reset it.

Then Jon Postel, who was much cleverer than the rest of us, wrote RFC821, which specified that email would use 7 bits, and the eighth bit would always be zero. And there was much rejoicing, for now it was possible to send messages concerning Star Trek (TOS, obviously) and patterns of Xs that looked a bit like naked ladies if you stood a long way away and squinted and had a vivid imagination, even from one university unto another, or to any of the other couple of hundred computers that comprised the net in those days.

But it came to pass that the netizens wanted to send proper pictures of naked ladies, one unto the other, because their university department had just got this really cool scanner that operated at, like, 72dpi and only cost a quarter of a million bucks.

Therefore Borenstein and Freed did publish RFC1521, which drew upon the encoding scheme described in RFC1421 to define a Base64 encoding scheme, which allowed 8-bit bytes to be converted into characters that could be represented in 6 bits (specifically, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx yz0123456789+/) . And the netizens did rejoice, and sent pictures of naked ladies back and forth; and each picture was about 137% of the size (in bytes) it had been in the original 8-bit encoding, but that didn't matter because it was a small price to pay for seeing pictures of boobies.

And it hasn't broken yet, so they haven't fixed it. More accurately, although there are specifications allowing for 8-bit email transmission, nobody bothers to implement them because it isn't worth the hassle.