Re: inaccurate estimates of message size
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 04:07:44PM -0400, dv1445@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Example: I open my INBOX, and there's a message that mutt says is 6.3K.
> I open the message, and return to the inbox. Now mutt says it's 0.3K.
> It's a message with 5 words in the body and no attachments. Then, I quit
> mutt, and fire it up again. Mutt says 6.3K again!
Hrm. I haven't seen that happen, but I assume it's because there's an
incorrect size in the Content-Disposition header in the message(s) in
question?
> Mutt also does this with attachments. Say I want to attach a PDF that I
> know for a fact is of size 125K. I attach it in the compose window, and
> immediately mutt says that it's of size, say, 193K. (Sometimes mutt adds
> only several K, usually lots). What's going on? Is mutt doing something
> to the PDF? -gmn
This behaviour is normal and, in fact, expected. Remember that SMTP was
designed to transmit purely textual data so, to work around this, any binary
data must be encoded as text before sending (this is typically done by the
client, in your case mutt). This encoding increases the size of the binary
data, hence the increase you see. For more information, see the Wikipedia
entry[1] that describes Base64, one of the more popular encoding
mechanisms.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
-mj
--
Michael-John Turner
mj@xxxxxxxxxxxx <> http://mjturner.net/