Hi Shel, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
Sometimes I receive pics as attachments, and I've noticed that the file size shown is often larger - sometimes much larger - than the actual size of the attachment. Yesterday I was sent a 3.1mb file, with no email message but "here it is!" yet I had to download a 4.4mb file. What's up with this?
For a binary file, like a photograph, to be passed through email servers, it has to be encoded, because many email server don't (didn't) properly handle full eight-bits-per-character binary files. So email client programs typically (depending on their settings) encode them using one of several techniques that convert the eight-bit binary data into "printable" characters. This typically involves conversions that render the eight-bit-per-byte data into ASCII characters at approximately a 4:3 ratio. So a 300 byte binary file would be encoded in such a way that it would require approximately 400 bytes "on the wire".
-- Thanks, DougF (KG4LMZ)
