06-24-2006, 04:08 PM
[quote blooz]why does the email tell me my file is, say, two mgs larger than the stuffed file on my desktop?
Because e-mail messages must be pure text according to the established e-mail protocol, your binary file first needs to be converted to a more inefficient format where it is represented as text. This is what the computer does when we "attach" a file to an e-mail message. The resulting data representing your file is larger than the original file by something like 20%. If your original file is 10 MB, then you should expect your e-mail message body to be in the neighborhood of 12MB.
Because e-mail messages must be pure text according to the established e-mail protocol, your binary file first needs to be converted to a more inefficient format where it is represented as text. This is what the computer does when we "attach" a file to an e-mail message. The resulting data representing your file is larger than the original file by something like 20%. If your original file is 10 MB, then you should expect your e-mail message body to be in the neighborhood of 12MB.