Re: Aaron Bartell Email Utility

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Mark S Waterbury
<mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi, Eric:

As far as I can tell, MIME encoding doubles the actual size (number of
bytes transmitted).

Mark

For very short e-mail, the overhead of the MIME format (additional
headers and such) can be large compared to the useful content. But
for attachments, it's much less than double.

The most common encoding used by MIME-formatted messages is Base64,
which in principle requires 4 bytes for every 3 encoded. So the
encoding of any particular attachment should be about 33% larger.
That's just for the Base64 encoding, though. Various sources on the
Web cite the overall overhead for MIME e-mail at 37%. There are more
precise calculations you can do if you're really interested and
pedantic.

John


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
http://techhelp.santovec.us/decode.htm
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1533113/calculate-the-size-to-a-base-64-encoded-message