Hi
Not the right place to ask this, I guess…but hey…
Why is it that under Thunderbird I get a ‘warning’ that the email will be 22 MB, when the attached file is only just under 16 MB ?
So…for the non-techies… why is it that email encoding and MIME formatting add about 33% to 37% more data overhead ?
Just trying to understand
Thx
W
A quick question to Google came back stating that Base64 Encoding directly imposes a 33% Penalty!
It also revealed the following, which I did not know:
When you write an HTML (rich text) email, Thunderbird usually sends a
multipart/alternativemessage. This means it includes two versions of your text: a plain text version for older clients, and the HTML version with your styling.
My only reaction is … WOW!!!
But … at least now we know.
Because all the bytes have to be converted to legal characters (like a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and a few more) because of mail formatting restrictions (internet mail is hopelessly archaic, even compared to FIDO mail)
That leaves us approximately 64 characters (or rather bit permutations) that can be used. That is effectively 2^6 permutations while we need 2^8 permutations for a byte.
That means that if you are really efficient with this you still need
4 characters to represent 3 bytes (4x6 = 3x8)
that is an increase of 33% (control characters not counted)
Which makes it worse if attachments are a bit on the heavy side…
W