When I receive an email with an attachment the actual attachment size is
always half what is stated in the size column of Microsoft Outlook.

Does anyone know why this is so. I am concerned what download amount is
taked of my Broadband usage account.

Thanks

The Captain90 wrote:

> When I receive an email with an attachment the actual attachment size is
> always half what is stated in the size column of Microsoft Outlook.
>
> Does anyone know why this is so. I am concerned what download amount is
> taked of my Broadband usage account.
>
> Thanks

You left out WHERE is the "actual" attachment size. If you mean that
the size gets smaller when you save the attachment to a file on your
hard disk then, yes, it will always be smaller.

All e-mail - and I mean ALL e-mail - gets sent as plain text. HTML is
text with tags inside of it. RTF (TNEF) is text with a winmail.dat
attachment (hidden by Microsoft's e-mail clients but not others) that
contains the formatting information. Attachments must get converted
into text to put inside a MIME section within the body of the message.
Encoding binary content into a long text string results in bloating the
size of the content. The size of the text used to encode the binary
content is 137%, or more, the size of the original binary file.

When you received the e-mail with the attachment, that long text string
has to be decoded back into its binary equivalent to save into a file.
So the bloated encoded text string results in less bytes when decoded to
put into a file.

The actual size of the e-mail (with or without attachments encoded into
the body of the e-mail) is shown in the Size column. That *is* the
actual size of the e-mail.