If you are using a locally installed mail client, you may have noticed that the size of an email seems to be a bit larger than the files you have attached to it. Why is that and is it a cause for concern? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a confused reader’s question.
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
SuperUser reader arc_lupus wants to know why the size of his email is larger than its attached files:
Why would the size of an email be larger than its attached files?
Here is a recent example: two images, one at 13 MB and the other at 3.6 MB, approximately 17 MB in total, and there were four lines of text. Mozilla Thunderbird then asked me if I really wanted to send an email with a total size of 22 MB.
Where is that difference in size coming from? Having 5 MB of text sounds like a bit much.
The Answer
SuperUser contributor David Schwartz has the answer for us:
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
Base 64 encoding encodes every 6 bits as a separate byte, so we need about 23,767,722 bytes. Dividing by 1024 twice gives us a total of 22.67 MiB. So that is where the 22 MiB comes from.
Email is a pretty old technology and does not assume an 8-bit clean pipe.
